Maya launcher

Pipelines
1

Can’t remember where I saw a post/thread on using a external launcher to setup artists’ Maya environment.

Can anybody point me to the thread or does anybody have opinions on a fast, convenient way to setup a Maya launcher?

Thanks,

2

i’ve always seen it done with bat files, but depending on the level of control you need and Maya version, you may be able to do it with sitecustomize.

3

At my last work I created a C# launcher that looked after version updates, I also had it so it would load a different script dependent on the project selected. But due to some changes in Windows 7 and threading, I would not recommended going down that path any longer.

One of the things I found was using a launcher in Windows 7 can be messy as it doesn’t work with task bar pinning and I some artist will pin the app and bypass your setup.

I second Seth’s setup if you can, Python_inside_Maya - sitecustomize.py help

~B)

4

[QUOTE=DrBob;8859]
Python_inside_Maya - sitecustomize.py help
[/QUOTE]

Haha yeah, and for future reference, anything Ian Jones says concerning Python and/or pipelines, you should probably pretty much just do…or at least think about long and hard.

5

Sounds like your doing what we setup, and are in the middle of upgrading now. Basically the Artist opens up the PipelineControl UI, that talks to our HR systems to figure out what Team your on and what type of user you are, then sets all the Maya environment up for you - including svn updating any code prior to actually launching Maya. Most of the environment is just dealt with in the userSetup that then calls a Python import and away we go…

6

Yeah Mark, we have a similar system here. We have a ‘launcher’ that syncs and launches the ‘real’ launcher. From there you can switch branches, configure your deploy, etc., and launch our tools. They can also create shortcuts to anything launchable from the launcher, so they can launch that directly instead of having to open up a UI just to launch something.

In theory the process works great, the only thing I would change is to make it a web-based launcher so we don’t have to do all sorts of tricky reflection and syncing work just to get the real launcher to launch from the bootstrap launcher.

And yeah Butters, we weren’t able to find a good solution for that taskbar pinning solution, short of advising people how to re-enable their Vista/XP style taskbar that allows traditional shortcut pinning.

7

We actually looked into a couple of ideas,

  • Have a app running in the background that monitors the applications being launched then intercept the app that we want to update, but because of admin privileges we were unable to call the C# code required.

  • Replace the shortcut, but that had the task bar issue. We looked deep for a fix for that, there might be a way but it requires some dodge windows hacking.

  • Windows Startup updater, this is what ended up with. It was a policy of our work to shutdown machines at the end of the day so this sounded like a great thing to piggy back on. This was a C# app that checked at startup the perforce logs and prompted with a list of changes and importance. The app was also able to run as a standalone updater throughout the day, prompting users to shut down their copies of max/maya/photoshop before performing the update (we had to do this as we have a few compiled plugins).

We also had a separate launcher that looked after all game options and platform loading.

~B)

8

Hey,
we’ve had a ‘MayaLauncher’ app for a few years and found it really useful.
The main reason we build this small C# app was to be able to change Maya versions, location, etc without having to retrain the artists in launching Maya :slight_smile:
All they have to do is start the MayaLauncher application which will then parse an xml file that syncs the latest Maya scripts/plugins and sets the required variables for the project.

Cheers,
P