Hello all!
So basically my question is this. I am not very experienced in using mel in the sense of using all its power to open things and post process or pre-process things. I am managing a stereoscopic short film project for school and I am in charge of layout as well as rendering.
So what I am trying to accomplish is an organized way of keeping track of my assets via one masterProject folder. Under this project there are 22 different scenes all of which use similar assests. So my plan was to layout all these scenes with referenced props and enviroments to keep everything non-destructive for the animators and allow my team to work on texturing, lighting and rendering. The reason I need to do this with mel is because the computers everyone has availible to them aren't really networked so it makes file management a nightmare. I have seen the openPipeline tools and I think they would be beneficial to my needs.
However since not everyone has openPipeline installed I was wondering if it as at all possible to integrate a mel script that would run these mel scripts from the projectDirectory when any one of the 22 scenes is open?
Is it all possible to have a mel script run that sets the project for the scene opened automatically? Or is that a manual process by default?
Since we all work on different computers the File Referencing is sometimes a pain having to go and look for the directory to manually load the reference. Are file references loaded automatically if they are in the same project as the scene in which they are referenced? If not is there anyway I can use mel to automatically load all the referenced files when anyone of the scenes is open?
I have also heard of using container nodes to reference in objects in a self loading way but I am not sure of that exact workflow. Does anyone know what I am talking about?
Also if anyone can point me in the driection of how I can control render globals for all 22 scenes using mel so that everyone is working in the same unit space and
My goal is to create a projectDirectory that can be dragged and dropped onto different drives and have so that when any of the scenes are opened that the project will be set and all the references loaded in automatically without having to manually find the directory for each.
Is this even possible? I am sure it would be with the amount of research I have done it seems to be possible. However I am definetly looking for a more experienced opinion on how I can at least minimize the problems that we are going to face with all the asset managment. I have all 22 scenes named in a connvention that is simple a related to each other all in ascii format in case I can change something on all of them using some type of Loop or something.
Anyway any and all advice on how to go about achieving this would be wonderful!!!
Its funny because in school they teach you how to create in 3d but not how to manage it very well. Asset management is a whole other beast!