I got a request to add motion builder to the shotgun desktop launcher. I did the basics of adding the engine to the project env but it looks like the engine is missing a startup.py so it can’t autodetect the exe.
What do I need to do to get it to show up?
Hey Joe – Can you tell us a little more? What lines did you add to your config exactly? Are you getting an error? ( You might need to check tk-desktop.log in the appropriate directory for your operating system.) Is the tk-motionbuilder engine present in your config (if you have a centralized config, it should be in install/app_store/tk-motionbuilder/<version>/ within your Pipeline Configuration root)?
It’s finding the engine, but the engine isn’t setup to detect the motion builder executable.
I created the tk-motionbuilder.yml in settings that only has tk-multi-about and tk-multi-shotgunpanel setup.
I updated engine_locations.yml to point to the correct version and updated the project.yml to add the engine.
This is in the log.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,243 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] --------------------
2019-11-05 17:20:56,243 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] Parsing Software entity for launch commands:
{ 'code': 'Motion Builder',
'engine': 'tk-motionbuilder',
'group_default': False,
'group_name': None,
'id': 85,
'image': None,
'linux_args': None,
'linux_path': None,
'mac_args': None,
'mac_path': None,
'products': None,
'type': 'Software',
'version_names': None,
'windows_args': None,
'windows_path': None}
2019-11-05 17:20:56,243 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] All path fields are None. Automatic mode.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,244 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] Attempting to auto discover software for tk-motionbuilder.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,244 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] Initializing engine launcher for tk-motionbuilder.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,246 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.core.platform.environment] Loading environment data from path: Z:\shotgun_configs\project-config\config\env\project.yml
2019-11-05 17:20:56,460 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.core.descriptor.io_descriptor.downloadable] Pre-core-0.18.120 download found at 'Z:\shotgun_configs\tk-shared_core\install\app_store\tk-motionbuilder\v0.5.0'. Assuming it is complete.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,460 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.core.descriptor.io_descriptor.downloadable] Pre-core-0.18.120 download found at 'Z:\shotgun_configs\tk-shared_core\install\app_store\tk-motionbuilder\v0.5.0'. Assuming it is complete.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,461 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.core.platform.software_launcher] SoftwareLauncher plugin file 'Z:\shotgun_configs\tk-shared_core\install\app_store\tk-motionbuilder\v0.5.0\startup.py' does not exist!
2019-11-05 17:20:56,461 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] Toolkit engine tk-motionbuilder does not support scanning for local DCC applications.
2019-11-05 17:20:56,461 [21012 DEBUG sgtk.env.project.tk-desktop.tk-multi-launchapp] Scan detected 0 software versions``Hey Tony –
Ah, gotcha. I see what’s going on here.
So, adding the tk-motionbuilder engine to an environment makes it so that when you launch Motionbuilder in a Shotgun-aware way (ie, from Desktop, Create, or from within the web app), you’ll have Toolkit apps available in it. But it doesn’t guarantee that Motionbuilder will show up in Desktop.
The launchers in Desktop are instances of tk-multi-launchapp – this is the app that provides launchers for software in Desktop, Create, and the Shotgun web app.
Try adding this line:
tk-multi-launchmotionbuilder: "@settings.tk-multi-launchapp.motionbuilder"
to the apps: block in config/env/includes/settings/tk-desktop.yml, if it’s not already there. (You can see what it looks like in the Default Config).
Then, in config/env/includes/software_paths.yml, be sure that the path for MotionBuilder is correct (here is that line in the Default Config).
Hopefully with those two bits in place, it should find MotionBuilder and it should show up in Desktop. If not, let me know and we can keep digging.
I tried that and it showed up.
I also copied startup.py from tk-maya, updating the path and removing the maya plugin startup and that also worked.
I’ll probably use my startup.py since I don’t know what version they are using.
I don’t see a shotgun menu either way, but I don’t think they care about that too much.