"Should I Save My Maya Files as .ma or .mb?"

.MA or .MB?

When it comes time to save your Maya scene file, you have a choice between ".ma" (Maya ASCII) or ".mb" (Maya Binary).  There’s no difference to the visual look of your scene based on how you save it.  Saving your scene as a ".ma" file saves your scene as a text file of commands. This allows you to open the file in a text editor such as Notepad, and edit the scene directly within the script of the file. This is handy if your file ends up corrupted and you want to try to restore it using scripts.  Saving as a ".mb" file strips out the text information and compresses it into numeric values.  True, you will have a reduced file size, but this makes it impossible to edit the saved scene file.

The preference at StratusCore/Render Rocket is to save as an ".ma" file.  This helps to prevent any potential file corruption during the transfer process to Render Rocket.  If you have more complex scenes with lots of layers and data, please save your scene as an .ma file.

".ma" format (Maya ASCII) is saved as a script with lines of commands that you are able to edit and save out in a text document. The benefit is that if your file becomes corrupt, you may be able to run scripts in order to save your scene.

".mb" (Maya binary) files are saved out as numeric values with compression, and no command lines are saved. That means if the file becomes corrupt, you have no chance of salvaging it. The only real benefit of ".mb" is that it makes file sizes smaller compared to ".ma"

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