[posted to rush.general]

(or if anybody knows a way to force maya to write them the way I want in the first place. I haven't been able to find any way to do that)

This newsgroup item from last summer might help you:

http://seriss.com/cgi-bin/rush/newsgroup-threaded.cgi?-view+1312

When I make .mi files on the mac using absolute paths for textures, etc they always end up starting wtih /Volumes/foo. I've gotten used to using BBedit to batch replace /Volumes/ with //corefileserver/ so that the pc's can render the files, but is there any way in rush to say

for this .mi file, use //corefileserver/ instead of /Volumes/ wherever it appears?

Yes, you can do all that in perl, if the above newsgroup article

on the 'dirmap' MEL command doesn't help you.

In fact, the current submit-mray.pl script does a search/replace

on the entire MI file to jam the output directory into

incremental mi files, because ray's stinky -file_name flag

only applies the change to the first frame in the incremental mi file,

and doesn't apply to the rest of the frames.

So the submit script makes a copy of the MI file in the rush tmp directory

($ENV{RUSH_TMPDIR}) applying a regex replace to all lines in the file

as it creates the copy.

See the ModifyMIOutputDir() function in submit-mray.pl.

You can just make a copy of that function, and just change

the function name, and the bit of code inside the while() loop

to apply the regex you need.

Here's how I'd do it:

---- snip

# CHANGE ALL INSTANCES OF /Volume/ -> //corefileserver/

#    $1 - src mi file

#    $2 - dst mi file

#

sub FixMIFile($$)

{

    my ($src,$dst) = @_;

    unless ( open(SRC_MI, "<$src") ) { print STDERR "--- FAILED: open $src for read: $!\n"; exit(1); }

    unless ( open(DST_MI, ">$dst") ) { print STDERR "--- FAILED: open $dst for write: $!\n"; exit(1); }

    # BIN MODE (FOR WINDOWS)

    binmode(SRC_MI);

    binmode(DST_MI);

    while (<SRC_MI>)

    {

        s%/Volumes/%//corefileserver/%g; # /Volumes/foo -> //corefileserver/foo..

        print DST_MI $_;

    }

    unless(close(SRC_MI)) { print STDERR "--- FAILED: close($src): $!\n"; exit(1); }

    unless(close(DST_MI)) { print STDERR "--- FAILED: close($dst): $!\n"; exit(1); }

}

---- snip

This makes a big assumption that all instances of the word

'/Volumes/' can be globally replaced with '//coreserver/' to make

things work. (This might be bad if one of the user's pathnames has

a subdirectory somewhere in the middle of the pathname called '/Volumes',

but hopefully you can avoid that)

So in the code, instead of rendering the original MI file with eg:

system("ray $miflags $mifile");

..you might change that to read:

# FIX MI FILE FIRST, MAKING LOCAL COPY, *THEN* RENDER THE COPY

FixMIFile($mifile, "$ENV{RUSH_TMPDIR}/foo.mi");

system("ray $miflags $ENV{RUSH_TMPDIR}/foo.mi");

..don't worry about removing the copy, rush will do that for you

automatically when the frame finishes, as rush blows the entire

$ENV{RUSH_TMPDIR} when the frame finishes or is dumped/requeued.

-- 

Greg Ercolano, erco@(email surpressed)

Rush Render Queue, http://seriss.com/rush/

Tel: 626-795-5922

Fax: 626-795-5947

Cel: 310-266-8906