MG-Autosave:

The No.01 pain in ass for animator could be ,after hours of working, the animation just gone after maya crash, windows bluescreen, power cutoff,etc. Redoing the same work is really frustrating.

So MGTools introduces two new features : real-time animation backup and MG-autosave.

We talk about MG-autosave feature now. Click more button to know real-time animation backup.

The theory of MG-autosave is, auto-save maya scene in each certain user-defined minutes, the auto-save won't change the current scene name. It saves the whole scene for you and does this in foreground. So when doing the actual save ,maya will be halted for a moment.

After Maya 2011, there has already been auto-save feature. So before 2011 MG-autosave use its own feature instead and use maya's own feature in and after 2011.

In Maya 2011, what MG-autosave helps is to morph the third "ENV" mode into "scene folder" Mode.

This tool actually works foreground when doing the save, so it works fine and steadily.

* Currently this feature only supports Maya 7.0~2012 x86 & x64. Support for feature maya version will come from feature MGTools update.

How to turn on / off MG-Autosave :

1. Right click on minitoolbox button ,select "animRescue backup wizard..", or you can open minitoolbox UI and click the first button.

2. Wizard pops up. Click the "Next->" button.

3. Click on the icon left, as the pix shown below. The icon will turn from gray to colored. Colored means that you have turn on MG-autosave, gray means off.

4. Press the "Save Config!!" button to make maya remember these settings. You only need to turn on backup once and during the next maya launch it will automatically be on.

If it is the first time you turn on the MGautosave, you must save config and restart maya to make it works.

Once for all, you don't need to restart maya the next time you turn on / off it.

Prompt before save: Whether or not to prompt a dialog to be confirmed before each auto-save.

Limit autosaves: Whether or not to limit the number of the auto-saved scenes. for spacing saving sake.

Number of autosaves: Set the max number of auto-saved scene for current scene.

intervar (minutes): The minutes during each two auto-save.

When doing the actual auto-save, it may takes more time than the intervar minutes, because if maya is not idle at the point of that time ,the auto-save will delayed.

Autosave Dest: Decide the target directory mode.

Project: Will autosave scene in the current project dir / autosave folder.

Named folder: Will autosave scene in the user-defined dir. Use "Browse.." button to pick a custom dir.

Scene folder: Will autosave scene in the current scene dir / autosave folder. In Maya 2011 or later, it is actually the "Env" mode. what MG-autosave does is setting environment variable to the "current scene / autosave" dir each time you open a new scene.

Tips: The turn on / off condition of backup can be known from MGTools main UI. The minitoolbox has two little rectangles in its right bottom corner. The green rectangle on the top means you have the real-time backup on currently, red rectangle on the bottom means the MG-autosave is on. Grey rectangle means the corresponding backup is off.