[MAYA] Texture paths: Relative vs. Absolute

Pipelines
1

Hi all,

I’ve got a problem:
An animator just installed a new hard drive, his windows assigned it to letter “D”.

Now, when he loads a scene it cant find the texture files associated with it. All the texture file’s paths are looking for a “C” drive.

When Maya starts up, the project is set to: (local Drive):\ProjectName

So theoretically, shouldn’t his maya (on startup) figure out it’s root directory ((Drive Letter):\ProjectName), and substitute the Drive Letter © with (D)?

Do I really have to write a script to change all the paths in a hacky, editing text in the “.ma” files way?

Thanks in advanced!

ps. I understand that when the “.ma” is saved all texture paths become absolute, but shouldnt Maya convert those paths (if it can) at startup/load?. I cant use the normal project structure, since were dealing with game asset management, example: we cant have all of our “SourceImages” in one folder.

2

You don’t have to write a script: there’s one already:
http://www.creativecrash.com/maya/downloads/scripts-plugins/rendering/misc/c/filetexturemanager

Now the ideal workflow would never have any use for such a script ofc, but nevertheless it’s handy!

3

Setting up a project on both machines, and saving the file from within the project should work. The whole point of a project is to make data portable. If it doesn’t work, then it is probably a bug…

I have had problems when BOTH paths exists, i.e., when working out of multiple branches and migrating a .ma from one branch to another branch. In this case, when the .ma is moved it continues to point to the textures in the original branch instead of using the new branch.

4

It is pretty amazing how hard the UI fights to make your paths absolute, it’s so irritating. If you set the paths in script they don’t get absolutized, but touching them using maya’s file chooser button does. I think it even absolutizes when you paste in a relative path string :frowning: However it the value is correctly set you will have the relative paths until somebody interacts with the gui. They’ve only had 16 years to work this one out. Sigh.

5

Once you start playing the “Wait how long has this feature been broken?” game with Maya things get depressing reaaal quick.