Can't Open Light Editor when Arnold is loaded

[Anonymous]

Hi !

The light Editor of maya doesn'y want to open when I work with arnold. I can open it if I unload mtoa in the plug in manager. I have this issue for a long time now, so I decided to reinstall maya yesterday but nothing changed.

A error line appear when I clic on it:

#Error: file: C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2017/scripts/startup/callPython.met line 54: UnicodeDecodeError: file C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2017\bin\python27.zip\ntpath.py line 85: ascii

I can add that I just reinstalled arnold (the plug in mtoa didn't want to load).

I word on:

Maya 2017 (student version) Update 3

Arnold MtoA 2.0.0.0

Windows 8.1

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

1. Using non-ASCII characters or whitespace in any folder name / file path, also as user/account name is not a good idea for Maya and some other applications. Change your setup accordingly if this is the problem.

2. Try a reset of your preferences.
Rename the folder prefs in folder 2017 to something like prefs_backup, or to reset everything, the folder 2017 to 2017_backup. Maya creates new folders. Detailed at:
https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/maya/troubleshooting/caas/sfdcarticles/sfdcarticles/Reset-May...

[Anonymous]

1. So the whitespace on my folder "program files" can be the cause ? If so, I don't know what to do because I can't rename it without deleting all my applications...

2. Nothing changed after that, I already did it before and I just tried it now. 

Thanks for the reply !

[mspeer · Accepted solution]

Hi!

"1. So the whitespace on my folder "program files" can be the cause ?"

- No

Check your user-name/folder and the project path of Maya.

[Anonymous]

Ah, yes I have an accent in my user name...

Do you have a simple solution to change username ?

Or maybe the problem comes from the preference folder in my documents. Is there a way to change the path of this folder from my documents to the root ? it seems tricky...

[Anonymous]

It was quiet risky but I managed to change the username !! I followed a tutorial (i'm french, so I don't post it here,but there is a lot of tutos to do it), and now it's ok ! I can open arnold and the light editor ! 

Thanks a lot for the support !

Just another question : do you know why the Render layer editor freeze sometimes when I try to change the render layer ? I use references and there are all clean (no renderlayer). I've seen this problem on other forums, and they was saying that there is no way to fix it for now... 

[mspeer]

Hi!

Glad you got it working, for others reading this, the solution might be to create a new user-account.

In Maya 2017 i highly recommend to use the new Render Setup, i didn't run into a problem so far.

[Anonymous]

I am using the new render setup too, I don't really know why it freeze and it doesn't happend a lot so it's not a big problem for the moment.

Thanks again for the help