Installing BonusTools to a custom location....

[stormstudios]

Is there an environment variable I can use to point to alternative locations for the ApplicationPlugin folder.

The installer chooses either $HOME/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins
or /usr/autodesk/ApplicationPlugins (depending on if you're root or not), and this is where Maya looks for it.

Is there some way I can force Maya to look for BonusTools, and other ApplicationPlugins, in different locations?

[keyner.chavarria]

Hello stormstudios,

I found this information with  File path variables/path for plug-ins,

File path variables

MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH

Search path for plug-ins. When a plug-in is specified by relative path name, the directories in this path are searched for the given plug-in name. This path also determines which directories are listed in the Plug-in Manager. In addition, for each module file found by Maya on startup, the plug-ins subdirectory of the module's root directory will be added to MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH. See the description of the MAYA_MODULE_PATH variable above and Distributing Multi-File Modules in the Maya Developer Help for more information.

Default for Windows
<user’s directory>/Documents/maya/<version>/plug-ins <user’s directory>/Documents/maya/plug-ins <maya_directory>/bin/plug-ins Here's is the link: http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2016/ENU//?guid=GUID-228CCA33-4AFE-4380-8C3D-18D23F7EAC72 I hope this is helpful, Thank you,

[stormstudios]

Hi,

 This unfortunately doesn't really solve the problem, at least not in an elegant way. The Bonustools package uses a PackageContents.xml file, which in turn sets things like the MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH and MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH for the version of Maya you're running. The process is described here http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/item?siteID=123112&id=22224478

  While I could set all the different PLUG_IN/MODULE/ICON environments manually, a much more elegant solution would be to be able to set an environment variable that points to the PackageContents.xml file. As far as I can tell, these seem to be hardcoded to ~/Autodesk/ApplicationPlugins (single user) or /usr/autodesk/ApplicationPlugins on Linux.

  If it's not currently possible, consider this a feature request. 🙂

[murphy]

did you ever find out the magic env variable to point to xml file?

[stormstudios]

No, I never did. Though I havne't checked if there is one for Maya 2018.