Please note that due to the nature of how Yeti integrates with Maya and third party rendering engines there is the expectation that users are comfortable setting and editing environment variables.


Prior to using Yeti you will need to make sure you have a valid license and it is installed correctly, please refer to Licensing Introduction for more information. 


Yeti’s distribution takes advantage of Maya’s Module scheme, where a single .mod file located in the installation root can be used to define the location of all plugins, scripts and icons needed to use Yeti. 


Once you have extracted Yeti to a sensible location there are a few quick steps that need to be followed to make sure Yeti can be used properly within Maya.


We highly recommending storing the Yeti distribution in a directory that reflects the version of Yeti being used, when new builds are downloaded you should create new directories along side this one and should only have to update a few variables to “upgrade”.


First you will need to edit the pgYetiMaya.mod file that can be found in the root directory of the Yeti distribution and replace path_to_yeti_root with the full path to the Yeti root directory ( which is most likely the directory the file is in ).


Then you will need to set the environment variable MAYA_MODULE_PATH to point to the directory when the previously edited .mod file resides.


Please note, if you are installing on Windows you will also need to add the Yeti bin directory to your global PATH environment variable. 


Once completed you will be able to load the plug-in from Maya’s plug-ins window by selected pgYetiMaya.so/dylib/dll from the plug-ins manager.

 

This is the only plugin you will need to worry about loading, all of the other extensions will be loaded automatically when required.


Step by Step Walkthrough

Here is a step by step walkthrough of the above process for a Yeti 5.0 release on Windows with Linux being similar. 

  1. Download the distribution Yeti-v5.0.0_Maya2024-windows.zip from the Yeti Downloads page (or the latest version).
  2. Extract this to a directory Yeti-v5.0.0 _Maya2024-windows which is the same name as the distribution
  3. Move this directory to a sane location on your system, for this example Yeti-v5.0.0 _Maya2024-windows will be moved to Program Files
  4. Open pgYetiMaya.mod and set the path to C:\Program Files\Yeti-v5.0.0 _Maya2024-windows (or your sane location as per step 3)
  5. Open Maya.env file in C:\Users\username\Documents\maya\2024 and add MAYA_MODULE_PATH = C:\Program Files\Yeti-v5.0.0 _Maya2024-windows (or your sane location as per step 3)


You should now be able to see and load pgYetiMaya.mll in the Maya plugins window.  


A few gotchas, if you have a Maya.env file in C:\Users\username\Documents\maya it will override anything set in the version subdirectory.