Maya Scene keeps crashing due to Mash in project

[Anonymous]

Hey Everyone,
 So I have a question, I was working on a scene of mine, in it I was using mash to create a zipper by duplicating an object along a curve I had. When I saved and closed out of maya I tried opening the scene and it would give me a fatal error and crash. I opened a previous save that doesn't have the Mash object in it, thought if I just deleted the history I would be fine, unfortunately the Mash stayed attached. When I tried opening this again after working on this scene like crazy it gave me fatal error again. I can also see when the scene is briefly open, Mash is in my outliner even after I had gotten rid of it. Is there anyway to somehow get rid of the Mash in my scene or recover what is in my scene besides the Mash object?  I've uploaded a screenshot because the forum won't accept the file of my scene

[adriaanK7WFS]

I have exactly the same issue. Did you end up resolving it?

[brurpo]

Same here, maya 2020 and 2022, both crash. Lost hours and hours of work.
Importing, pausing viewport, etc etc, nothing works.
The scene briefly opens then crashes. Mash also seems to be the culprit.

edit: here is how I solved it.
Make sure Maya is closed.
Go to Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2020\plug-ins
Move the Mash folder somewhere outside the Maya installation folder, this way you prevent your scene from autoloading Mash.
Now the scene opens, delete unknown nodes, and every trace of mash nodes.
Save, close maya, and move the mash folder back.

[kolobrzeg]

Most likely you are using 2020.4 and the MASH scene was created with 2020.0. You could check what version was sued to create the scene by opening it in the text editor (I recommend Visual Studio Code - it's good when it comes to handling larger files) and search for "cutIdentifier" - it will also show in the *.mb as some of the info is in ASCII there.

CutID basically marks the release date of the given version, for example "202011110415" is Maya 2020.4

[sanjay.lama2045]

thank you sir, this fixed my crash issue

[techEFH67]

ok... but if i delete mash nodes in the scene, i must restart my set dressing from 0 🙂 ?

[liam_poezevaraQK68M]

When i open maya without the MASH folder the mash network simply does not appear, and when i load mash back in it comes back and i instantly crashes. How did you remove the mash network from the scene?

[liam_poezevaraQK68M]

UPDATE: i got a way to work around, i just loaded my scene without mash and exported the meshes to reimport them in an other scene (note: ctrl C+ctrl V did not work for some reason)

[brurpo]

You had to delete their nodes in the outlines.

Another option would be to save the scene as .ma, open it in a text editor, search for a mash entry that you suspect is the culprit for the crash and delete it from the file.

This way you can avoid losing all your mash progress.