Save a Copy Script for Maya - Better Versioning

Since publishing and Photoshop was my love before 3D, I have a lot of workflows that I miss in Maya that I have in a lot of Adobe apps, and one of those is the Save a Copy feature. While working, you’ll often have something that’s not finalized but maybe you like how it’s looking or it’s a milestone that’s important to save and Save a Copy lets you save a named version while still working on the main file (if you hit save again later, it saves with the original name, not the Save a Copy name).

In Maya, you might be about to clean up your weights so it’s possible you’ll screw stuff up, or a pose or composition may look cool, so you want the option of rolling back to that exact moment. Autosave and nameless versioning doesn’t do anything to tell you what’s in that file so the SaveACopy script prompts you to make a version of your file and appends the info you enter in the prompt to the name of the file:

The file was called versionMe in the video but it’s now called saveACopy and is loaded by entering “saveACopy;” in the MEL command line or Script Editor. I put it in a command-alt-S hotkey so it acts just like Photoshop or Illustrator’s Save a Copy feature. The script doesn’t do anything dangerous and is completely cross-platform since it only uses MEL/Maya commands to toggle a new name, save a file with that name, then set the name back to the original. It’s actually really basic and the only limitation is that it assumes you don’t have any dots (.) in your folder or file names since it takes “name” from “name.ma” or “name.mb”, assuming that the dot separates the extension from the name. It’s a bad habit to name files or folders with periods, so if you’re used to doing that, you should use underscores (_) instead of those periods. The script works fine with spaces in directories or names. Grab it here and tell Autosave that you met someone new, but you can still be friends.