Setting Up a Project?
 

Hello!

So I recently ran into an issue in which all of the textures from my Maya project were missing when I moved the Maya Binary file over to another computer for rendering. I looked around and found that I should've been storing the textures and other items in the proper locations from the very start of beginning my Maya project. The damage has already been done (4 or 5 scenes each with hundreds of objects that I'll have to retexture), but I was mainly wondering, what steps can I take to avoid these issues in the first place? I know how to use the "Set Project" function (I think) and I definitely know how to create a new Maya project through the Project Window. Where should I be storing my textures however? My UV maps that I exported from ZBrush? Relevant OBJ files? There are so many folders in each Maya project that I don't even know where to begin. Thanks in advance!

If you store all your images in the sourceimages folder, then move the whole project folder to the new machine, all should be good.

Most of the directories are where Maya stores it's internal data caches, maps and what not. The ones you use are

Sourceimages = textures
images = rendered images and data from the artisan tools
Movies = a place to store playblasts
Data = a place to store obj's and scene data you want to keep separate from Maya scenes
scenes = a place to store your ma / mb files

Note Maya wont care if you store your stuff in other places it will simply make organisation more difficult for you and the people working for you. Maya will care if you have no project folder and you try and use the paint tools or you try and cache an animation or do somthing else that causes maya to want to save files.

Hope that helps

So I set it up like this and relocated all of the files into the project folder. However, when I moved it over to the other computer, all of the file paths still were looking for the path on my old computer (C:\\Documents\maya\mayaprojects\bird\sourceimages ) as opposed to the folder location on the new computer. Is there any reason why it does this instead of searching in the project folder that's on the drive of the new computer? (G:\\_)? Thanks for your help!