fully gobsmacked

ok a few of my students have been telling me about SOup for Maya, downloaded it today and I am blown away.

Available here (http://soup-dev.com/). Created by Peter Shipkov it is an amazing procedural toolset for Maya. If you create anything good with it then make sure you give back to the community in the form of a tutorial as there is so much to learn here.

For the animators have a look at the trajectory tool, it allows you to manipulate the animated object either in the curves or with a motion path or by saving keys...no idea how he has done this but wow.

Right I'm off to play some more

sorting out texture paths

As some of you insist on not using project directories in maya to organise your files you will be finding that stuff becomes disconnected. Unfortunately Maya does not use relative paths (very annoying). You can switch them to relative paths by saving as a .ma and altering the path in a text editor or......

you can use this awesome script on Creative crash that manages it for you
LINK (FileTextureManager)

If someone sees Pete point this out to him as he is having to fight with this at the moment