[Maya] Displaying errors for artists so they don't miss them

How do you guys make artists aware of errors that occur during a script? I raise exceptions that have simple and clear messages, however, more often than not an artist won’t realize a script errored (either they don’t pay attention to the status bar or some callback/script job runs after scene elements were modified that produces output and pushes the error from being displayed last). They then complain that the result is incorrect and it ends up taking up both our time to get the traceback emailed to the relevant party (or for them to realize it’s an issue on their end).

Do you guys run in to this? How do you solve the issue?

I started mocking up an output window that is basically just a logging handler that displays color-coded log messages and is displayed if an error occurs. I figure this way it would be obvious to an artist if an error occurs, and would provide them with just the traceback and other associated log outputs instead of the entire maya script editor. Would this be annoying? Efficient? Looking for general input.

I collect the tracebacks automatically and post them to a slack channel for the TA without user intervention, since they aren’t very useful to the users and they help us remotely support people. I do tend to rely on the help line (with the red or yellow) for the actual message to the users. Of course, in a given tool context you can always catch the exceptions, do whatever user facing cleanup you want, and then pass the exception so it still gets logged.

use the maya guiexcepthook and add your own function in there. Anything uncaught goes to our inboxes with full stack traces and anything else we might find relevant (maya scene or build #). Then you can see whats breaking and fix it before they even have time to come bug you.

Very good question. It’s one of those things that we deal with a lot as well. Artists just missing an error message that should’ve been brought to their attention.

Maya does a good job at hiding warnings/error messages since it’ll often print out something just after errors or warnings were printed and as such the help line didn’t pop out as much.

It kind of depends on the tool they are using or what you’re validating:

  • If it’s something that rarely happens and is critical if missed by all means raise a pop-up to them. If this saves hours later it’s time well spent.

  • If it happens somewhay frequently and you want artists to be aware you might be able to trigger viewport messages for them. Though I know there are many artists that dislike this, and I think they can even disable that.

  • If the warning or error is more TD information where tools need improvements or scene are just plain broken that an artist won’t be able to fix without introducing tons of other messy things then I definitely think a way to bring it to the TDs attention in a log (like Slack or mail) without the artist requiring to poke you about it sounds like a very interestiny solution. Would love to hear more about how this actually “behaves” in a real production and for what team sizes they believe it’s a good fit?


Thanks for the ideas so far! :wink:

typed on phone, sorry for any typos

if it’s an unhandled exception, we send an email to the TA team. If its a issue handled by the script itself, we try to use Message Boxes when appropriate to let the user know what happened. Spitting out warnings and errors to the help line is not very helpful in my experience - some of our artists even hide it. Plus, like you mentioned, sometimes the error or warning can be pushed off the help line too quickly for anyone to notice it.