Just wanted to update as to what we did with the new setup.

Users no longer have a MAYA_APP_DIR environment variable set but instead have their own user maya preferences folders. (I have made each users Windows Profile a roaming one, so the maya folder created in their user My Documents folder is called no matter what machine they are on)

Each user then gets a copy of our custom studio Maya.env file that loads up all our custom scripts, shelves and shaders upon startup of maya.

This now works really well meaning users can maintain their own style and layout while having access to the studios shared scripts and shaders.

I have avoided playing with the userSetup.mel file for now as everthing seems to be running nicely as is.

Many thanks for your help.

I should also thank my friend Anthony Tan (http://www.greenworm.net/personal) for his IT supoprt.

Best,

Rich

For example, userSetup may load a plugin and then try to do something with it, like set up a default configuration. Maya loads plugins as a kind of background process, so a mel command attempting to do something with the plugin may fail because the plugin is not loaded yet.

Another case is where you may have modified mel scripts in your central scripts path, and you want these to override the originals that are part of the maya install. Depending on the script, maya may have already sourced the original script before it gets to userSetup, so if you are using userSetup (as I suggested) to set up scripts and plugins paths, you may have to also source the modified scripts so that maya knows it should use yours instead of the originals which it already saw.

I could give more examples, but I might leave it at that for now. Generally, once you get the hang of how maya loads, you can figure out a strategy to get your setup working.

David

Thanks so much for getting back to me. I did not have RSS feeds for comments on this post so only just seen your reply.

That sounds like a great way of doing it!

I am not too familiar with the UserSetup.mel file. I normally use it to force maya to source scripts it sometimes fails to read. I will read up on it (believe there are lots of blog posts about it)

I contacted Autodesk support (as we have subscription support) and do you know what they said when I asked for some advice on a possible setup:

"I will check around but as far as I can tell there is no way of setting up a configuration that you are requesting"

That is what I get for paid support!!

The community is lucky there are people like you who are willing to share their knowledge and experiences with others.

Much appreciated and I will let you know our re-setup goes

Cheers,

Rich

My preferred way of sharing a common setup across the studio is to store the scripts, plugins, bitmaps, etc in a shared network location, which I'll refer to as the "central server". But I do not point MAYA_APP_DIR to that location and this avoids the problem you mentioned where one user's preference changes affect all users. Each user sets MAYA_APP_DIR to a folder on their local machine. For neatness this can be set up the same way on all machines, but does not have to be. Then, and this is the important bit, each user gets a copy of the admin approved Maya.env file, which they must place in their local scripts folder. This Maya.env can be very simple and include a single environment variable, MAYA_SCRIPT_PATH which points to a folder in the central server that contains the (admin approved) userSetup.mel.

So everybody has their own local MAYA_APP_DIR but courtesy of their approved copy of Maya.env they are all starting with the same centralized userSetup.mel.

userSetup.mel is used to enforce the same config on all of the local machines and it does this by setting environment variables and sourcing or running mel and python scripts. It can also be used to copy plugins form the central server to the local machine (making it easier to update plugin files while people are still working - they get the update next time they start maya). And it can be used to overwrite user prefs on the local machine so that each new maya session starts with the same prefs.

Actually I dont like forcing people to all use the same prefs, so I dont do that last bit. In fact I think users should have some control of their own environment so I add a line at the end of the central userSetup.mel to source a local file called "localUserSetup.mel" (ie this could be their old personal userSetup.mel just renamed). Users are free to add what ever config stuff they like to their localUserSetup.mel

I think this system gives a good balance between central control and user customization. New scripts, plugins, menus and shelves etc can be set up by the admin and will be available to all users when they restart maya, but users will still be able to create or change hotkeys and other prefs and add their own mel scripts to the mix. To set up a new user, all I have to do is give them the official copy of Maya.env.

Ok... that was a bit longer than I thought it would be.

I have always loved this post and this has been my setup for a long time.

I have a question about how you could take this one step further.

I have our studio setup up like above where all our artists have a user environment MAYA_APP_DIR variable pointing to a shared file on our server. This means artist can go to any machine, log in, and have the same custom shelves, scripts, shaders etc on any machine.

One of the issues we have though is that artists have their own little habbits and want their own custom shortcuts/layouts etc. When they change a hotkey for example it gets changed for all users. Or if they change a tool setting it gets set to those values for all.

How could I go the next step and introduce local user prefs, but still maintain our studio default scripts/shelves and shaders for each user. Basically I want to make it so our studio defaults replace the maya install defaults (without actually moving all our folders into the install directory of maya on each machine) and then have users able to have their own maya prefs on top of the studio ones.

Any advice would be great.

Cheers,

Rich

Are you running in the same trouble? Do you know how to solve this problem?

@ David,
i sent you and eMail. Did you get it?

Thank you in advance.
Best Regards,
XBO

Problem has been resolved!

if (! `pluginInfo-query-l-n Mayatomr`) loadPlugin "Mayatomr";
When I put it in when loaded into userSetup.mel, maya error:
/ / Error: if (! `PluginInfo-query-l-n Mayatomr`) loadPlugin "Mayatomr";
/ /
/ / Error: "C: / Documents and Settings / li / My Documents/maya/7.0/scripts/userSetup.mel" line 1.52: Syntax error / /

How to solve this problem, thank you