Make texture paths relative

[trevor.adams]

(Copied from original User Voice forum)

"As someone who often has to switch between workstations when working on a project, the file path of the textures is very important. No matter how many times I save the files to relative, Maya always, ALWAYS, sets them to global. This is particularly annoying in the lighting/rendering stage, when I often have to link the files again to the project folder. The path SHOULD be relative if it's saved as relative.

There is a script to quickly rename all the files in a scene called "Clean Texture Paths" from Lightcraft, but this is only a temp solution to a problem that shouldn't happen in the first place.

Please, please, make file paths relative to the project folder, not the entire drive."

[aaronfross]

It is extremely un-helpful when Maya secretly, silently, invisibly changes all file paths to absolute. This happens when I merely move a scene file to another project.

Maya should either warn users that their files are being pathed to some folder outside the current project, or even better, Maya should not do ANYTHING to the paths at all. Ever.

[g2m.agent]

Maya should learn from the editing software, when textures or other resources are not available, replace them with default image or something. especially to learn resource management from Davinci Resolve.

[stevedavy]

This is and always has been one of the most production unfriendly issues when working with Maya, and goes beyond just the relative/absolute path issue.Any time a project is reopened after the fact or received from a third party, you can guarantee that there are going to be file textures looking for  "C:\Dave\Desktop" or whatever. I've been using the File Texture Manager script for about 15 years and STILL find it the best and only reliable way to repath textures, even after the release Maya's own editors. Part of the problem is that Maya assumes a perfect workflow, with project space being properly set, textures being finished and correctly located in the source images folder, and everything being linked in that way. This is almost never the case, especially in smaller shops where production is chaotic and messy, textures get versioned and renamed and never actually finaled, linked temp files are dropped in weird places, and textures that do end up being finaled often never get properly collated and moved into source images. The only reliable way to collate all external file textures from a Maya scene is to use the Archive tool, which works but re-creates the entire folder structure linking to every single texture. This is not practical or user friendly. It absolutely ought to be possible to require any and all textures to be inside the currently set project space before they can be linked, or offer some other native method of preventing busy artists from linking to textures on their desktops or other errant locations.

[HasanDiab]

Maya should have a file path manager, like "Asset Manager" in 3ds Max, but just better, modern and with better functionality !!