Maya only Publishing Geometry as .ma Files

Pipeline Integrations
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I’m trying to re-implement Shotgun’s “Publish Geometry” functionality within the Maya publisher, because someone took it out in a long ago version of our studio’s pipeline configuration.

I’ve managed to get it into a working state, but for some reason it’s only publishing geometry as Maya ASCII (.ma) files. We really want/need Alembic files (.abc), and it was my understanding that Alembics were the default output, so I’m not clear on where the error is occurring since I haven’t actually changed anything in the plugin.

Does anyone have any ideas where I should be looking if I wanted to control the filetype of geometry publishes from within Maya?

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Hello @rthompson

In order to be sure that everything is working you need to check 3 different things (kind of at the same time).

You need to check 2 files in the tk-config (Your pipeline config).

  • Your template.yml file (search for the asset_alembic_cache part) You need to be sure that this is still coherent with your schema and that it fits your needs
  • Check the env/includes/settings/tk-multi-publish2.yml (search for Maya # asset step and # shot step) and see if you did configure this correctly to call the last file involved which is…
  • tk-maya/hooks/tk-multi-publish2/basic/publish_session_geometry.py This is the default file in the Shotgun Tk that handles publishing Alembic files within Maya.

You need to make sure that all this 3 files are coherent between them and if you make changes to one always make sure that you check the other two because they are all connected. Lastly there is the schema folders structure which needs to as well follow what is on the template.yml but I am not sure how much this impacts the publishing process.

Hopes this helps.

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Hi

By default the Maya publish settings are defined on the Asset context only. The plugin settings are here:


Which points to the plugin file and template file that @Jerome_Drese mentioned.

The publish plugin will publish and alembic files that are found by the collector. So you need to make sure you are either using the default collector settings, or if you have a custom collector that it still contains alembic collecting code, or calling the {engine} collector via super to allow it to collect as well. (depends on how you have the publish hierarchy setup.)

Also the alembic publishing will not work if you have not enabled alembic in Maya.

Best
Phil

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