Category Archives: Linux

[mtoa] Running a silent install

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On Windows, run the MtoA installer with the flags /S /FORCE_UNINSTALL=1

MtoA-2.0.2.2-2018.exe /S /FORCE_UNINSTALL=1

You can use /D to specify a different install location.

On Linux, use the – – silent command line flags. Note the space between “- -” and “silent”.

sudo sh MtoA-2.0.1.1-linux-2017.run -- silent

The Linux installer will put MtoA in /opt/solidangle/mtoa/<maya version>. If you want to install in a different location, you can extract MtoA, and then set up your own script for installing MtoA.

On OSX, use the installer command:

sudo installer -pkg "MtoA-2.0.2.4-darwin-2017.pgk" -target /

Note that -target is a volume, not a folder.

[Linux] Missing .sog files?

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Sometimes on Linux you may get “unable to load dynamic library” errors for .sog files. Like this:

00:00:00     0MB WARNING |  unable to load dynamic library: /home/stephen/solidangle/mtoa/2014/xgen_procedural.sog: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

or this:

00:00:00     0MB WARNING |  unable to load dynamic library: /usr/apps/houdini/houdini-13.0.343/htoa/arnold_plugins/driver_houdini.sog: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

Don’t worry about the “.sog” part. In most cases, Arnold isn’t actually looking for a .sog file. Arnold is trying to load a .so file, and either the .so itself or a dependency is missing. The “.sog” is printed by mistake in the log message (and this is fixed in the next Arnold version).

So (heh) focus your investigation on why Arnold couldn’t load the .so file (try running ldd on it).

In the two examples above:

  • xgen_procedural.so couldn’t be loaded because LD_LIBRARY_PATH didn’t include the Maya lib folder, so all the tbb-related libraries were missing.
  • driver_houdini.so was missing some Houdini dependencies, but in this case it was being loaded into MtoA, so driver_houdini wasn’t needed and the warning could be safely ignored.

What’s a .sog?
If a plugin has a .sog extension, AiLoadPlugins() will load the plugin with RTLD_GLOBAL, which means the symbols from the plugin will be globally exposed and available to other plugins.

.sog is a Maya naming convention for an .so to be dlopen’ed with RLD_GLOBAL

[MtoA] Installing MtoA 1.0.0 on Linux

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A few notes:

  • You need root permissions to do the automatic installation.
  • Use sudo, not su. You want to install MtoA under your user account, not the root user account. sudo will let you install MtoA with root permissions, but under your own user account.
  • If you install as root, the MtoA installer copies mtoa.mod to /root/maya/2014-x64/modules. Unless you’re running Maya as root, that’s no good. You want the mtoa.mod file in your home directory (for example, /home/stephen/maya/2014-x64/modules). That way, when you run Maya it will load mtoa.mod and find the MtoA plugin.
  • The automatic installation also copies arnoldRenderer.xml to /usr/autodesk/maya2014-x64/bin/rendererDesc. That allows you to batch render with Arnold from Maya, without having to set MAYA_RENDER_DESC_PATH.