External drive has new file path on new computer, maya can't find textures

[haakon]

Hi! I have just installed maya on a new computer, and I have lots of maya scenes that I need to render. These files are stored on an external harddrive, together with their textures. The external drive used to be "K:" on my old computer, now it's "G:". So when I open the scenes maya can't find the texture files, because the file paths now start with "G:" instead of "K:". I could go into each file node and change the path one by one, but that would be very tedious, especially because I have like twenty scenes each with around 50 textures. Is there an easier way? Some kind of Auto-replace script or maybe just a way to make windows interpret the external drive as "K:" again?

[haakon]

solved it myself, should have googled a little more before posting, sorry! Anyways here is how I fixed it in windows:
http://www.techrepublic.com/blog/window-on-windows/how-do-i-force-windows-to-assign-a-drive-letter-to-an-external-hard-drive-when-attached/631 

[joojaa]

This is the reason you SHOULD use projects*, even for all assets if your stuff is under same project root then maya will know where to find stuff no matter what the directory is as long as the file was loaded form within the project. Also it makes archiving things MUCH easier (please note for any media producer who does not archive their stuff properly ans with very good care is throwing away 1/3 of the value of ANY project, so its like throwing money down the drain).

In any case just a heads up for you, if you do this anyway there is a command that will save yourin the future (for example because you wanted to open the files in a macintosh system which can NOT have drive letters). Which is primarily mean to mitigate just this problem, and its called dirmap.

• yes i know it's not always convenient, but it sure as hell is convenient, backup, versioning and archive time. So its a bit of trade of between doing right for the big picture versus doing the thing that is easy right now.

[haakon]

I see your point, but what do you mean when you say "use projects"? I do use projects. Do you mean that if I place the textures in the source images folder of the project any machine will find them automatically?

[joojaa]

Yes if you move the entire folder then thats what meya does, assuming theres a project is defined properly offcourse.

[haakon]

I see. Thank you very much Joojaa! I'll definetly keep everything inside the project folders from now on.