Project environment variable expansion

[galakgorr]

Hello,

I'm working with a particularly weird pipeline, where the "images" path of the project is using an environment variable that's pointing to a location outside of the project. So, the "images" project path is "/$JOB/seq/img/cg," where $JOB expands to the current shot's folder. This all works fine, for the most part. Maya's software renderer understands where to put the output files.

However, VRay doesn't. Whenever I try to test render, I get this warning:
// Warning: The file path for /$JOB/seq/img/cg/tmp/masterLayer/v001/exr/ cannot be created. //

I tried searching for where the warning was coming from, hoping it was a MEL script I could modify, but unfortunately it seems like it's coming from vrayformaya.so (at least according to grep).

Can anything be done to make sure VRay is expanding environment variables when determining an output path? Since Maya Software is correctly writing files to the tmp directory, I can only assume this is what's happening. It also appears that VRay has the same problem when looking for textures as well... it isn't expanding environment variables as it should.

Thanks!

[yolov]

Writing output files to $var/path is something that we don't support, but I'll log it as a request.
Reading files from $var/file.ext actually works, but for VRay the usage is ${var}/file.ext - see if that works.

[yolov]

For writing output files it should also work with ${VAR}.
The only thing that we don't do for the moment is created folder that don't already exist when the output path is defined with a variable (example: ${VAR}/newFolder/image.png will not create newFolder if it doesn't exist). Creating new folders only works when the output path does not contain a variable.