Interoperability in Maya

Maya supports a wide array of formats to let you share files between many applications.

Maya supports a wide array of formats, from Maya's default ASCII .ma and binary .mb file formats to alembic and USD, letting you share files between many applications.

Save scenes as .ma and .mb

Maya uses the same formats as Maya (.ma, .mb,) so you can work between the two applications.
Note: Maya doesn't save scene files in .mlt format, but you can load them. When opening a .mlt file in Maya, resave the file in .ma or .mb format.

USD

Universal Scene Description (USD) support in Maya lets artists work seamlessly with USD in conjunction with Maya workflows. The pre-built Maya USD open source plug-in is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. See USD Plug-in for Maya for more information.

PSD support

You can use .psd (Photoshop Document) files in Maya texture nodes. Using PSD files with layer sets facilitate iterative painting.

Using PSD files with layer sets let you:
  • Adobe Photoshop artists can add, modify, or delete any number of layers within a layer set while maintaining the connections in Maya (see also Create a PSD file with layer sets from within Maya).
  • Maya artists can convert a PSD node to a Layered Texture, and see the layer sets as multiple PSD File Textures connected to a layered texture in Hypershade.
    Note:

    Maya treats all layers within a layer set as a single flattened image.

For more information, see Use PSD Networks as textures and Edit PSD Networks.

Alembic Support

Maya also saves and loads scenes and geometry as Alembic-based cache files. Alembic files are highly portable and application dependent, meaning they can be shared, processed, and played back by a number of content creation applications.

For more information, see the topic Alembic Caching.

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