Maya ASCII (.ma) File Format Specifications?

[Anonymous]

Hi, I am developing an external module, that will run on a system I am building, that needs to export its files to Maya, using the ASCII File Format Specification.

Where do I find informations about the syntax and what each line means, so I can write it correctly?

I found this page
http://caad.arch.ethz.ch/info/maya/manual/FileFormats/index.html

but it is pretty incomplete and superficial.

Is there any doc I can download that has the full file specification and how to write .ma files?

thanks

[Anonymous]

As far as I know there is no such document. You should really look into using fbx instead, for which all the information that you're looking for is available.

http://autodesk.com/fbx

[Anonymous]

It's not impossible, although I wouldn't know anything about doing this myself, but I've seen software which actually performs just such a task - e.g. "FaceGen".