Setting a project AFTER starting a project??`

[Anonymous]

Typically an AutoCAD / Revit user here.  My son is doing a project with Maya and I'm trying to help troubleshoot an issue he is experiencing.  He has a scene with a corner of an apartment.  He has a window on the exterior wall, perpendicular interior wall creating a corner, a sofa, chair, table, plant, etc...  He has applied textures to all these.  He has occasionally pushes/transfers his project file up to a lab computer.  On these occasions he would see a few textures go missing.  He would quickly reassign them and move forward.  This most recent time however, practically ALL the textures are missing.  We has reached out to fellow students and the prof on how to fix this and they all refer to the "setting" the project.  I've googled to read up and view youtube videos on what this is and I realize this is SIMILAR to the transmittal tool for AutoCAD.  It grabs everything and pulls it into a zip file so you can etransmit to someone else and they have everything.

My question is can a Maya project be "set" AFTER he's gotten this far applying textures?  Will it grab everything a place it into a new folder that you can then move to a new computer?  If he can't SET the project at this point... How do we find the directory being referenced for textures so we can copy them to that folder to be found?

[daunish]

Hey so I only use Maya but I'm going to try to explain this to the best of my ability.

First off there are two ways Maya finds files:

Absolute: This is the full path to the file Maya is looking for. ex - C:\Projects\CoolProject\Textures\texture.jpg

Relative: This is the path from the "set project" to the file. ex - Root\Textures\texture.jpg

Next, what setting a project means. It's always good to set your project in Maya. This is basically telling Maya what your "working" folder is and where all the associated files can be found. It can be done at any time, but should only be done once per project and will have to be set anytime you use a new computer or switch projects. A "workspace.mel" is created in the root folder, leave everything as is.

Setting a project does not zip it or package it in any way. Just tells Maya where things are. To package a folder you want Archive. But don't use this for his stuff. It's better to have your project directories set correctly.

What your son should do now:

Set his project on his home computer. Make sure all his texture files are somewhere under the root. Then he should go to Windows - General Editors - File Path Editor. Set all the textures paths to their new home in the set project. You should see Maya switch from absolute paths for the images to relative. Now on the new computer, as long as his project is set, Maya will automatically find the files!

It's important to know about the File Path Editor. Really, if he wanted to (i don't recommend it). He could constantly change the paths whenever he works on a new computer... it's doable, but an awful way of working.

I hope I've done enough to explain this, do let me know if you guys are still lost!