# Use case
As a Pipeline Developer supporting color management workflows across multiple DCCs, it would be great if I could rely on using the OpenColorIO Python bindings from within Maya in order to perform basic query related to the OCIO config currently in use.
Right now Nuke, Houdini and RV all ship those bindings, make it easier for pipeline code that is only called inside those DCCs to call the OCIO API from Python. While for Maya, despite internally supporting OCIO, a separate installation of the PyOpenColorIO package is needed in order to perform those same calls. This adds to the maintenance burden for pipeline teams, especially since the OCIO bindings are not abi3 compatible and as such one needs to carefully ensure that the external PyOpenColorIO bindings one could install would match the specific interpreter version used by Maya (and that the ABIs of Maya and the external OCIO library are compatible).
# Technical details
Right now, trying this import in Nuke would succeed :
>>> import PyOpenColorIO as OCIO >>> OCIO.__file__ '/Applications/Foundry/nuke/15.0v1/Nuke15.0v1.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so'
Same for Houdini:
>>> import PyOpenColorIO as OCIO
>>> OCIO.__file__
'/Applications/SideFX/houdini/20.0.547-py310/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.10/lib/python3.10/site-packages/PyOpenColorIO.so'
While in Maya 2024.2 it would error :
>>> import PyOpenColorIO as OCIO Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> ModuleNotFoundError: No module named 'PyOpenColorIO'
This is confirmed by looking on disk at what ships with every DCC:
$ find /Applications -type f -name 'PyOpenColorIO.so' /Applications/Foundry/nuke/13.0v4/Nuke13.0v4.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/Foundry/nuke/15.0v4/Nuke15.0v4.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/Foundry/nuke/14.0v2/Nuke14.0v2.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/Foundry/nuke/13.2v2/Nuke13.2v2.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/Foundry/nuke/15.0v1/Nuke15.0v1.app/Contents/MacOS/plugins/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/RV.app/Contents/python3/lib/python3.7/lib-dynload/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/RV.app/Contents/python2/lib/python2.7/lib-dynload/PyOpenColorIO.so /Applications/SideFX/houdini/20.0.547-py310/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/3.10/lib/python3.10/site-packages/PyOpenColorIO.so
Thanks!
Valerio
