Although Maya is an incredibly powerful tool, it's almost always just one step in a larger toolchain. Whether you're using Maya to create prerendered animation for film and video or creating assets for use in real-time applications, you'll generally always need to interface Maya or the content you create within it, with other applications. Very often, this takes the form of either reading or writing data of a specific format.
In this chapter, we'll be looking at how to work with custom data formats, both text-based and binary, and to both read and write data.