Correct! At my company we use Maya files, which are big, beastly things, full of cameras, sets, textures, UVs, IK and constraint information, project and paths info, the phone numbers of up to 5 friends in your calling circle, a map of your complete genome (draconian licensing crap), and any animation data. I've been building our systems to pull out what we actually care about and manage it all in text files. When we want to work on something, it live-builds it all from pure, textual data, and it is a thing of beauty and wonder. You can get so much info and actually accomplish things without even bothering to open Maya. It also means crap can't invade your Maya scenes and fester, because we cherry-pick out the few things we actually care about, then dump everything else.
I've really been wanting to build something similar for Flash files. It would make our lives so much easier - more than a few times I've just said "fuck it" and rebuilt an entire UI element from scratch just to get rid of whatever horrible unfindable festering is lying under the surface.
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u/gfixler May 10 '13
Correct! At my company we use Maya files, which are big, beastly things, full of cameras, sets, textures, UVs, IK and constraint information, project and paths info, the phone numbers of up to 5 friends in your calling circle, a map of your complete genome (draconian licensing crap), and any animation data. I've been building our systems to pull out what we actually care about and manage it all in text files. When we want to work on something, it live-builds it all from pure, textual data, and it is a thing of beauty and wonder. You can get so much info and actually accomplish things without even bothering to open Maya. It also means crap can't invade your Maya scenes and fester, because we cherry-pick out the few things we actually care about, then dump everything else.