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> Forum Home > Feature Requests > Modify Maya.sx

	Tue, 02/Dec/2008 6:11 PM
Clay 1 Post	Hi, I wonder if there's any way to make modifications to the Maya.sx compiled module. I think the most convenient would be to have access to the source code (along with whatever libraries, headers, etc. are necessary to compile). If that's not possible, then I have some suggestions for improving it: 1) When the user chooses to render one or several layers, it would be really nice if the layer name(s) would appear in the job title, similar to the way in which the scene name appears once it has been selected. We often submit several jobs for the same scene file, each with a different layer, and this would be very helpful to distinguish among them in the SmedgeGUI Jobs window. 2) It would be helpful if there was a way to automatically fill in the frame range with the range for a scene file, once it is selected. This could work by accessing the RenderGlobals in the scene file to determine the render range, or perhaps by storing the ranges in some kind of database, so when a scene is chosen again, the default range can be recalled from the DB and entered as a default value in the Range field in the Job Submit window. Thanks, Clay Budin PandaPanther NYC
	Tue, 02/Dec/2008 10:33 PM
Robin 1138 Posts	You may find it easiest to simply submit the Smedge Job from inside of the Maya interface. You can then extract all of the pertinent information you want for the job from Maya directly, skip the SmedgeGui submit job window altogether, and name the job anything you wish, including using layer names and such. You should take a look at the MEL scripts included in the Utilities folder of the Smedge distribution. You probably could modify one of these scripts to do whatever you wanted far more easily than trying to do it with the Smedge module source code. You can also use the Maya interface to build a GUI for submitting the job, if you really want, or you can choose to just have users click a shelf button to submit the job. We are not opposed to making changes to the module code either, of course. However, one of the problems with detecting the frame range, for example, is that because Maya files can be either ASCII or binary, you must use the Maya API to load the file in order to extract information like the render global data, and if the scene file is large or complex, this can be slow. Also, if you need to re-render just a portion of the scene file, or if artists have not set up their render globals correctly, this can cause confusion for end users. Finally, because the Maya API must be relinked with every version of Maya, this would make the Maya.sx Module dependent on a specific Maya version, which may cause the module to fail or not work correctly with any other version of Maya. I think using the MEL script will be your best bet, but if that doesn't work for you, let me know and we can see what else we can come up with that would fit your specific situation better. Thanks -robin

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