Maya Station

How to prevent Maya writing a "requires" command for a plug-in

Do you wonder why error messages about some plug-in or other that Maya cannot find continue to appear when you load a scene? Do you wish you could force Maya to unload a plug-in when saving your scene so you can avoid having it load again with the scene file ?

The objective of this tutorial is help you understand why Maya might include a reference to a plug-in in a scene file, and how to prevent Maya from doing so.

To complete this tutorial, you will need Maya 2015 SP6 or Maya 2015 Ext1 & SP6 because this Service Pack release includes two new MEL commands : unknownPlugin and unknownNode; this tutorial demonstrates how to use both of them.

file -loadReferenceDepth ; a couple of tips for defering references

First post of the new year, and I bring you a couple of tips about how to defer loading references.

A couple of useful procedures for finding related Proxy references

If you have Proxy references in a scene it can be tricky to find which ones are related.

References and render layers..

It can be time-consuming enough to set up your render layers: assigning objects, assigning material overrides...but you could also be in for a nasty surprise when you browse through your render layers and Maya spits out errors, like this one:

In this post, I'll tell you how to avoid these errors, and how to keep those render layer assignments.

How to update material assignments on a referenced model.

So you want to take your character model (let's call it fileA) and reference it into a new scene (fileB) so you can rig it...That way, your buddy can refine the model while you work on the rig.

Then you realise that none of the material assignments your colleague makes in fileA are visible to you on the referenced model in fileB.

You turn to your buddy...