Central install of vray

We’re trying to create a central install of vray rather than installing once per machine. Is this a) possible and b) a good idea?

We do it with other plug ins and scripts, but can’t seem to get vray to work. Modifying to the paths in Maya.env causes maya to see the directory (when looking at Preferences > Plug Ins) but Maya doesn’t see the vray plug in for some reason. Anybody else doing this? Maybe we’re missing something.

Thanks for any help

Hi,
Yes and yes.

Hi,
awesome and thanks!

OK, so some progress. Doing the central install works. Modifying the Maya.ENV works and I see vrayformaya.plugin in the Plug In Manager. But checking “Loaded” results in:

// Error: line 1: Unable to dynamically load : /Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle
dlopen(/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle, 1): Library not loaded: @executable_path/libvray.dylib
Referenced from: /Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle
Reason: image not found //
// Error: line 1: dlopen(/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle, 1): Library not loaded: @executable_path/libvray.dylib
Referenced from: /Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle
Reason: image not found //
// Error: line 1: dlopen(/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle, 1): Library not loaded: @executable_path/libvray.dylib
Referenced from: /Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/plug-ins/vrayformaya.bundle
Reason: image not found (vrayformaya) //

so something is not well. Here is the relavant portion of the Maya.ENV:

VRAY_FOR_MAYA2014_MAIN_x64=/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray
VRAY_FOR_MAYA2014_PLUGINS_x64=/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/vrayplugins
XBMLANGPATH=/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/icons/%B

VRAY_PATH=$VRAY_PATH:/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/maya_vray/bin
VRAY_TOOLS_MAYA2014_x64=/Volumes/tools/vray_builds/2014/vray/bin

Any thoughts?

I think it’s only a good idea as long as you don’t have to many machines that try to access vray at the same time. We have a central install running in our studio, but I bet it wouldn’t perform very well if we’d have many many machines.
But for us it works very well!

These need to be system env variables, not maya env variables.

The script path, plugin path, icon path can be set in the maya.env, but the otherstuff is a system var.

Some folks use server side envs from the domain controller, others set it per machine… we set the system vars local to maya on maya launch using python commands.
That gives the most flexibility for running different versions, and your users don’t

**Here **is a post that explains …

Some time back I made a step-by-step on this. Check it out!

Please make sure that the above environment variables are already created and their values point out to the correct location.

Was VRAY_TOOLS_MAYA20XX_x64 and VRAY_PATH introduced recently?
I haven’t seen this before and our setup seems to run fine without it.

These are not needed by V-Ray itself, however some customers wanted the installer to set them for convenience.

Best regards,
Vlado