Remove Turtle

[trevor.adams]

(Copied from original User Voice forum)

"I receive a lot of files from freelancers, outsource that have Turtle enabled (for no apparent reason). This quickly spreads through the project like a virus and is almost impossible to remove. It causes all sorts of problems - unrecognized, locked nodes that can't be removed, file type can't be changed etc. Can Turtle be included as a separate install so you have to actively turn it on and want to use it, rather than being on by default and infecting everyone's files."

[djonesuk]

Turtle isn't enabled by default in my installs.  It's an addon that has to be loaded. 

Why not remind your contractors of your SOPs for Maya?

[alexis_p]

If turtle was an optional plugin, we would not run into this issue at all.

The only way reliably ensure Turtle does not comeback and infect all your scenes is to delete the bin/plug-ins/Turtle.mll from the install location...

Why not make it separate, like Bifrost, Mtoa, MentalRay  (at least at the moment, depending on the Maya release they are either mandatory or optionnal), given that about half the world has been complaining about it for the last decade ?

Thx

[djonesuk]

As I said, Turtle isn't enabled by default.  Any external who has enabled Turtle to use would obviously have it installed (even if they had to tick a box during installation), so I don't see how this would solve the original problem. 

If it's your standard MIS desktop then, as you have already identified, you can just delete the addon during the build process.

[alexis_p]

@djonesuk indeed it's not loaded, but it's installed and available. Given how the Maya "require" system works, as soon as you open a file where Turtle was loaded, Turtle will get loaded and create a whole bunch of nodes. And somehow it migrates to your preferences and pretty soon all of your scenes get contaminated.

On the other hand, if Turtle is not installed at all, you get an "unknown" node, and that's it...

[tj.galda]

We're happy to say that we did a bunch of work around this.  With 2017, Turtle is no longer on by default & does not create notes until it is used.  The nodes it would create were for it's settings and we changed the behavior such that Turtle's settings nodes are now created on first use instead of on file new/open.  

Even if you open a new scene with the Turtle plug in turned on, Turtle will still not create nodes unless you use Turtle.  It will create the nodes required upon first use only.

If you do open a scene that has Turtle nodes which you wish to remove, you can force unload the plugin & that action will remove the nodes & dynamic attributes to aid with cleaning up your scenes.

[For QA purposes fixes found in Jira tickets 3518, 3526, 3504, & 3509. ]

[tj.galda]

Also worth noting that this button can clean your scene for you as well:

[ramairou]

Turtle is like an annoying virus which spreads easily from file to file