How to Fix the Maya Chinese Characters Virus

Have you ever been working on your Maya file, and when you go to save, you see this warning pop up on your script editor?

This is a virus in Maya that could potentially affect your files. But don’t worry! It’s not extremely harmful; it’s more of a nuisance than anything. Because of this virus, some animators have had problems with rigs and other animations. Personally, I couldn’t import a certain rig because of this bug. According to word of mouth, this virus actually started out as a patch to fix another virus. The rough translation of the Chinese characters is: “Your file is very healthy – then I say I didn’t mean anything by it ”. (which seems pretty ominous) The script was put out to fix some sort of virus but then became a virus of its own. If you have this, that means you must have gotten it by saving a file on one of the Monty computers and bringing it home with you. When you open that saved Maya file on your home computer, the virus is now in your computer for Maya. It may seem a bit scary, but it’s known to do virtually nothing, and there’s an easy fix to this! Follow the steps below, and you’ll be free of this bug!

1. If you’ve saved your Maya file and notice that warning pop-up at the bottom where your script editor is, head up to the top of your file and go to WINDOWS > SETTINGS/PREFERENCES > PLUG-IN MANAGER  
2. Next, type in “scanner” in the plug-in manager. MayaScanner.py and MayaScannerCB.py will pop up. Click “loaded” for both of them. It’s recommended that you don’t click “AutoLoad” because it can be a nuisance when you open up files in the future.
3. Then go to FILE > SCAN CURRENT SCENE. You can also do “Scan File…” and then  look for a file and scan it in your folder if you suspect it might be corrupted.
4. This pop-up will ask you if you want to fix the corruption, click “YES”.

5. Make sure to save your file, so click “Save and Quit”, or if you’re not worried about losing anything, click “Quit without Saving”. Once you click one of those, your entire Maya scene will quit.         
6. Open up Maya again and set your project to what it was. Then go over steps 1, 2, and 3 again. If the scan worked, you will get this message at the bottom of your Maya file in the script editor.

You are now free of the Chinese character virus! It’s always a great idea to use this scanner for very important Maya files you may be working on in case this virus does something to your file further in your project. You can use it at your discretion for other projects you’re not too worried about. But as said above, this virus does virtually nothing. There have only been a few cases where it has done some funky things to people’s files. So if your Maya file is acting weird and you can’t seem to figure out what might be wrong with it, try doing this scanning method to get rid of this virus and see if that helps!