Compatability between Maya 4 and Maya 5 tutorial?

[articulatedarm]

OK... Supernoob here... I am atempting to use a tutorial that says it is for Maya 5.. and I have Maya 4. The tutorial has on eof those premade scene things... it says to go to File.. then Project... then set... then it says to go to scenes and open one of them... but they won't open from there.

So I tried to open the "scene" directly from the file and when it opened in Maya it said something about being corrupted.

Is this because of some incompatiability between Maya 4 and Maya 5? Or is the file just screwed up?

[joojaa]

is ita ma or mb file?

[articulatedarm]

Mb

Can I change it to MA and it will work then? or no?

[joojaa]

A ma file could be editted to be compatible (or as compatible as possible) yes!

prgrams arae usualy backwards compatible not forwards... but a matter of fact us that maya is mostly forwards compatible too... as long as you edit the filees a bit. This offcourse requires you to have ma files.

[articulatedarm]

So MA can be converted to MB...

But MB can't be converted to MA?

That stinks... because the file i have that isn't working is an MB.

[joojaa]

Well i allways recomend to use ma. It is possible to read out a mb as ma but its not terribly straight forward (youd loose a bit of data) try the fileversion converter utility on this site.

[articulatedarm]

In reply to:try the fileversion converter utility on this site.

Does anyone know where this is? I can't find it. Is this the actual name of the program?

Thanks for the help joojaa.

[joojaa]

did you even try to look for it in the plugins section under utilities wuch is the most logical place tos start

anyway http://www.highend3d.com/maya/plugins/?gro...ction=utilities lookj for the maya file converter

[articulatedarm]

I was looking all over for it. Like trying to find a needle in a haystack. I didn't know it was a "plug-in".

I was looking in the "tools" section. But I didn't even know if I was in the right general area. I also tried doing a search for it but for some reason whenever I do a search here it shows no results.

And to top it all off this site runs extremely slow on my computer.

Thanks again though... much appreciated.

[articulatedarm]

It still isn't working for some reason. I installed the plugin(i think)there aren't many directions.

Nothing seems to have changed.

[joojaa]

its a winodws command line tool copy it to any path directory and run it by typoing its name it ougfht to give yeou instructions on its use.

[articulatedarm]

Well... I hate to be a pest... but what does this mean:

its a windows command line tool copy it to any path directory