Koolie is the internal Maya project switcher we create at ICT to quickly switch between projects.
Why Koolie?
We work on a bunch of different products at any given point in time and are constantly switching back and forth between them. Maya’s project window helps with this a lot, but doesn’t do everything we need and is prone to user error.
Approach
We decided to build an interface, which we call Koolie, that addresses these deficiencies as well as streamlines our workflows and ties in with our tool suite. This is built on top of Maya’s existing project settings and user preferences functionality.
What it Adds
Only root project folders are allowed to be added to Koolie. This eliminates the chance of users picking an incorrect directory which can result in all kinds of problems with file and directory pathing.
Maya projects are added to the interface. This means when switching projects users only have to pick from a dropdown showing various projects rather than browsing through directory hierarchies to find the correct root folder whenever they are switching projects.
Paths outside of the Maya project can be associated with the project. For example, we use Unity as our game engine and assets need to be exported from Maya into the correct directories with the Unity project. We don’t want to set absolute paths for export because this is prone to breakage if drive letters or directory paths differ between users. So instead individual users will associate an absolute directory for Unity with that Maya project. With this done the files which we export from can all have relative paths.
From a scripting standpoint it provides a one stop location for getting and setting the various global details of a project.
We can enforce or at least give warning about other aspects of the projects. For example we can make sure people are using the correct units or warn them if they are using the wrong Maya version.