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I may have been a little naive thinking that I could simply copy a few scripts from one install to the other and upgrade my sp1 install to subscription advantage pack without the name change. Well it almost worked but as it turns out the instructions in my previous post missed some things.

I've updated the list of files that need to be copied and I should point out that the additions (marked with a "+") will overwrite existing files in the sp1 install. Normally I wouldn't advise doing something like this, but its a bit of a special case. We have both installation packages at hand and they are both fresh installs. If something goes wrong we can just uninstall everything and start again.

So, here's what I missed:

There are 80 assorted Mocap Examples in the presets folder.
Updated mel scripts that handle the creation of the "Effects Assets" menu.
Updated version of the Mayatomr plugin that allows rendering of compressed EXR files.

I also forgot to mention the "Craft Directors Studio" plugin support files which are installed to a location outside of the main maya install folder. (C:\Program Files (x86)\Craft Animations by default). You don't need to do anything with these. You just need to use the plugin manager to load the craftdirectorstudioadaptor_maya2011.5.mll. Do the same for the Substance.mll while you're there. (And ICEFlow.mll if you're lucky enough to have access to all that awesomeness too!)

If you don't see the "Effects Assets" menu in nDynamics, then you have to use the menu set customise UI to revert to the default nDynamics menus. This is explained in detail in the SAP release notes.

If I discover any other missing bits and pieces I'll update here.

Last week I downloaded and installed the "Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack". This is really just "Maya 2011 Service Pack 1" with a couple of extras thrown in to sweeten the deal for subscribers.

For some reason, so far unknown to me, the autodesk devs decided to distribute the subscription advantage pack as "2011.5" while continuing to call service pack 1 "2011". I'm pretty sure the code base for 2011.5 is the same as for 2011 - at least all the 3rd party plugins I've tried still load and behave correctly (and usually a version change requires a recompile of 3rd party plugins).

By default the subscription advantage pack gets installed to "C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya 2011 Subscription Advantage Pack". I know I could have redirected it to a more sensible and shorter path name, but I like to stick to defaults since they make some things more straight forward and less prone to human error (for example, deployment on a render farm).

The thing that really bothered me was the way my prefs folder would now have to be named "2011.5-x64". I know it's only a few extra characters, but it makes transporting prefs messy (for example, when I need to work on a system that does not have the SAP).

Ok, enough whinging. There's an easy solution. And it goes something like this. (more...)