Maya 2014 - what to look out for?

Theodox · March 28, 2017, 9:24pm

I’m gearing up to switch the studio over to maya 2014 (from 2011). I’d appreciate hearing from anybody who’s run into gotchas that I need to plan for during the transition…

passerby · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

I haven’t see many issues, but I still mostly work with 2012, it does use a different python version so old pyc and pyd files will be broken, but that won’t matter if your scripts are all .py or Mel.

it also likely compiles its C++ plugins on a different vsc, but I haven’t checked.

Loading · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

So you probably already know that Maya/Motionbuilder now comes with Python 2.7.3. There are a few external modules like P4Python that will not work unless you
recompile against Python27 and the same version of Visual Studio that was used to build Maya.

Jason Parks has the compiled version here…
http://jason-parks.com/Downloads/p4_maya_2_7_3/

Maya 2014 without any service packs has lots of bugs. Here’s an example.

Maya 2014 SP1 I haven’t had any issues.

Maya 2014 SP2 I’ve ran into a pretty big bug that broke our pipeline at the time.

Maya 2014 SP3 seems to have fixed the issues in SP2 and so far I haven’t had any other issues.

Now if you decide to move to PySide which is now supported in both Maya and Motionbuilder instead of using PyQt4.uic.loadUiType( UI_LOCATION )
You will need to use something like this to parse the .ui file if you don’t already convert the .ui files to python. (The link below has been slightly modified. I’ve grabbed the original from Pablo Winant)

github.com

nicholas-silveira/art_pipeline/blob/master/python/packages/oop_python/core/py_pyside.py

import pysideuic # @UnresolvedImport
import xml.etree.ElementTree as xml # @UnresolvedImport
from cStringIO import StringIO # @UnresolvedImport

import PySide.QtGui # @UnresolvedImport # @UnusedImport

def get_pyside_class( ui_file ):
   """
   Pablo Winant
   """
   parsed = xml.parse( ui_file )
   widget_class = parsed.find( 'widget' ).get( 'class' )
   form_class = parsed.find( 'class' ).text
   
   with open( ui_file, 'r' ) as f:
      o = StringIO()
      frame = {}
      
      pysideuic.compileUi( f, o, indent = 0 )
      pyc = compile( o.getvalue(), '<string>', 'exec' )

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Almost forgot. Here’s a Maya PySide example.
http://nicholas-silveira.blogspot.com/2013/10/get-maya-2014-pyside-example.html

Hope this helps,
-Nick

Mark-J · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

We’re in the same boat, looking to upgrade everybody after Christmas so if you’ve had any serious issues I’d love to hear.

thanks

Mark

btribble · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

How is the stability compared to 2012 x64 SP1 (if anyone knows)? We’re seeing regular crashes when working with skin clusters and also if you leave the UV window open while working on “other stuff”.

EDIT: I realized this wasn’t clear at all. We’re seeing these problems in 2012, and I’m wondering if 2014 is improved stability-wise.

bclark · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

There are some stability improvements in the service pack, we are up to 3 so far, if you waited, you should be good. It has been very stable for me and with the improvements to the the skin tools and a list of other improvements, I don’t and haven’t looked back.

There was a slowdown on the anim curve node that I haven’t yet tested out but make sure you check your rig /anim speed and see if you have a problem. Not sure if /when this issue hits.

Loading · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

Soooo Maya 2014 has been pretty stable, but I’m now having MORE DLL issues now with lxml.

-Nick

Theodox · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

I just use elementTree (which has no c dependencies) instead of lxml unless speed is really important

Loading · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

Yeah. I was looking for a way to auto format my xml files. I’m now just going with elementTree and creating my own xml format class. Just something people might
want to be aware of. Also if you know of a way of formatting xml files to make them easier to read please let me know.

Thanks,
-Nick

Theodox · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

Fred Lundh’s effbot site has a trick someplace for auto-indenting to make things cleaner, I think.

If you’re the only consumer of the files, skip the XML and use YAML. It gets rid of all the damn angle brackets, so it’s far more human readable and also significantly smaller


Yaml:
    - has no brackets
    - is easy to prettyprint
    features:
        - lists
        - key: value pairs
        - inter object references  (which XML doesn't do)   
    PyYAML:  pure python libraries
Also available for: 
    - C#
    - c/c++
    - JS

TheMaxx · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

agreed, pick yaml or json. xml is too verbose and a pain to work with. There is an indent function of effbot as theodox mentioned, but its still xml.

Loading · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

Thanks guys! All my tools use Json, but the engine that we’re using uses xml and our artists have been editing them by hand. So I need to streamline the process a bit.

Theodox · March 28, 2017, 9:49pm

http://yaml.org/spec/1.2/spec.html#id2759572FWIW Yaml is a superset of JSON - valid json will be readable to a YAML interpreter.