Maya 2013 - File referencing problems...

[Anonymous]

Hello

We have recently been experiencing problems with our scenes which reference other Maya scene files. We typically develop a base scene which comprises only geometry and which has its materials appplied. This base scene is then referenced into a final scene which includes cameras and which uses Render Layers to override some of the materials.

Frequently we open a final scene only to find that the reference to the geometry has been 'broken' leaving a blue wireframe view of the geometry in the viewport. On inspecting the Reference Editor we see that the path has a '//' double forward slash within it. The resolved path beneath does not have this '//'.

Often the only way to resolve this is to reference in the base scene again and delete the old reference, then set the Render Layers up again (this can be painful).

We all run Maya 2013 on Macs. All of our Maya files reside on a Mac Pro running OS X Lion.

Can anyone explain the '//' in the path or provide any good guidance for making our referenced scenes more robust. We have just started to remove any spaces from any file/folders, replacing them with underscores, in the paths to see if that helps.

Thank you.

[Anonymous]

In the cases where your final scene is broken, does the missing reference dialog pop up when you try to open/import/reference the final scene? And does browsing to the location of your geometry file cause everything to load correctly?

Maya adds this extra slash to file paths so it can tell which part of the path is relative to the project. When resolving paths, if the absolute path could not be found, then Maya will take the part of the path after the double-slash and look for that in the users's current project.

If browsing to the location of the file works, then perhaps you just need to set the current project before opening your final scene? (i.e. File > Set Project). Just an idea! 🙂

[Anonymous]

Thanks for the reply

On opening the scene which has several references we do not experience the dialog box asking us to locate the missing referenced file. We do however sometimes find that on opening the scene parts of the model are displayed as a dark blue wireframe and the scene does not know what material should be applied to these parts. On checking in the reference editor we saw the '//' in the path and thought that this may indicate a problem with the path to the referenced file so we investigated in this direction.

Are you suggesting that ALL paths in the reference editor will have '//' at some point indicating the relative element of the path?

Very interesting. We have a Materials scene which as the name suggests has nothing but shaders within it and it is located in a common folder which is not part of any Project folder. This is our way to maintain continuity in our materials from project to project. Should we be copying this Materials scene into our Project folder so that all project resources are within the Project hierachy?

Referencing is so powerful but not at all robust in Maya as far as we can see.

Thanks

[Anonymous]

So you are sure that the missing materials are a result of a path problem? If you edit the paths via the AE, command-line or the File Path Editor, does everything works as expected?

If so, and if the problem is that the absolute path in the file is just not resolving properly when Maya is opened, you have a few options:

1) You could make your materials relative to the project, and rely on Maya's relative path smarts to find them.

2) You can use an environment variable for part of the material location and just make sure that every artist has this env var set correctly.

3) Similar to an env var, you could use the dirmap command to setup mappings to the materials location. And you can make these mappings more permanent by adding them to the userSetup.mel.

As for the "//", this is used for all paths in Maya that are being treated as filenames. So references, file textures, caches etc. will use this. It will only be added to paths that are relative to the current project at the time that the file is saved. The extra slash is part of the raw path (i.e. the path that is saved to file), not the resolved path (which is what most UI in Maya will display). So you should be able to see it if you open up the .ma file.