Maya Says You Can't Save Due to "Unknown Nodes" - What Should You Do?

Autodesk Maya is a big and complex piece of software, full of traps and pitfalls for the unwary. The "Unknown Nodes" error sometimes occurs when you are trying to save your work, but Maya won’t let you save. This can be frustrating, and the solution is not obvious. What is an unknown node anyway? And what should you do when this happens?

Luckily, the solution is fairly straightforward:

First, try saving your work as a different file type. Maya offers two kinds - .mb (small files) and .ma (larger files).

Now, under the file tab, scroll down to find "optimize scene size". From there, scroll down to find "remove unknown nodes" and click "optimize". You're done.

Note that there are 3 different types of unknown nodes that can prevent re-saving as a different format.  They are Unknown nodes, unknown transforms and unknown dag nodes. The second two are uncommon. To delete all three types: type
delete `ls -type unknown -type unknownDag -type unknownTransform`
in the Script Editor.

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