In several recent cases, I had to figure out why MtoA wouldn’t load on a render farm. The root cause turned out to be the PyMel debug log: ~/pymel.log
If PyMel cannot find or open ~/pymel.log, that stops PyMel and anything that uses PyMel (like MtoA).
On a render farm, this can happen if the render manager user account doesn’t have a home folder, ~/pymel.log doesn’t expand to a valid location, or if user doesn’t have read-write permissions on pymel.log.
For example, here’s the Process Monitor log when ~ cannot be resolved:
And here’s the log when the user doesn’t have read-write permissions:
The location of pymel.log is specified by the pymel.conf configuration file, like this:
os.path.expanduser('~/pymel.log')
When there’s a problem with the PyMel debug log, it can be hard to tell from the MtoA errors. You may see API errors like this (but the line numbers all point to unrelated bits of source code). However, if you see these line numbers with the MtoA 1.x, it’s probably a pymel.log problem.
API error detected in plugins\mtoa\Main.cpp at line 794 : (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure 00:00:00 514MB ERROR | Failed to register renderer 'arnold' API error detected in plugins\mtoa\Main.cpp at line 716 : (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure 00:00:00 514MB ERROR | Failed to register Arnold swatch renderer API error detected in plugins\mtoa\Main.cpp at line 716 : (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure 00:00:00 515MB ERROR | Failed to register Arnold swatch renderer
You might also see errors like this:
API error detected in plugins/mtoa/Main.cpp at line 794 : (kFailure): Unexpected Internal Failure Error: line 1: IOError: file /Applications/Autodesk/maya2015/Maya.app/Contents/Frameworks/Python.framework/Versions/Current/lib/python2.7/logging/__init__.py line 916: 13 Error: line 1: Failed to register renderer 'arnold' Error: line 1: initializePlugin function failed (mtoa)
