There’s no shortage of info on generating an egg from a maya model, but I’m having a lot of trouble finding any documentation / discussion threads on getting an .egg file into maya for further editing. (The original .ma file no longer exists, and the person who made it has since left.)
I’ve copied all relevant .mll files from Panda’s plugins folder (libmayapview85, libmayasavepview85, and mayaeggimport85 – I assume only the latter one is relevant here) and I’ve instructed Maya to load them (via Window>Settings/Preferences>Plug-in Manager).
Dragging and dropping the file into Maya does nothing. Attempting to import via the file menu (File>Import) allows me to select ‘Panda3D Egg Import’, but then gives me the following error:
I don’t know anything about a melScript-based importer. But you can use the command-line tool egg2maya to convert an egg file to a .mb or an .ma file.
Note that the conversion is not lossless–some parts of egg format, and many parts of Maya format, are not 100% supported by the converter. But it does make its best attempt.
The melScript importer (or whatever .mll is) is part of the standard Panda3D installation (in the /Panda3D-x.y.z/plugins/ directory).
By the way, is egg2maya a new tool? I have v. 1.5.3 on my laptop, and egg2maya doesn’t seem to be included. Is it possible that you meant maya2egg with some option to do the conversion in reverse?