Set a Project in Maya

Use projects to manage all the files associated with a scene.

Because scenes can depend upon multiple resources from different locations, projects let you keep track of the files related to a scene by storing them in one location.

To set a project

From the menu bar go to File > Set Project, or click the Set Project button in any file manager dialog box.
Navigate to the desired folder.
Click Set.

Setting a project creates a directory structure of the folders associated with your scene. Some of these folders are scenes, templates, render data, and source images folders. There can be multiple subfolders in the root project folders. See Project subfolders, below.

Note: A workspace.mel file is also created and added to the project. See Workspace.mel file.

Each time you open or save a file, Maya searches the project folders first. Since Maya searches the project Scenes folder first by default, it is good practice to set a project every time you start work on a new file.

Note: You can browse and save outside of the project folder for files, but Maya always looks in the currently set project folders first. See Projects and relative paths, below.

Projects are useful when you are working with a team or over multiple computers because once you set a project, your scene assets are organized in one location. So, for example, if you sent a colleague a scene file, it would not have the textures or scripts that are associated with it. If you sent the project file instead, when your colleague opened the file, Maya can find all the related files needed to work on it. And since all the files are in one place, working with scenes in Projects makes it easy to create backups. See Share a Maya Project.

Tip: You can find the location path of a project you are working on if you open the Render Settings window. The path to the current project’s images subfolder is shown. (You can review the rules set for the File Path in the Project Window (See Project Window in the File menu). You may want to edit a file rule if you have multiple projects that use textures from a single location.

Tip: If you do not want Maya to default to a specific folder, open the Projects window and delete the folder. Although, if you rename root folder, you must open the Set Project window and reset it, otherwise the paths are broken.

For more about setting a project, watch a video here: Setting a Maya project.

Project subfolders

You can see where files are sourced/saved in the project directory using the Project Window or the workspace.mel file. Here are the most common:

Loaded and saved files: <project>\scenes
Textures: <project>\sourceimages
Playblasts: <project>\movies
Rendered images: <project>\image

Projects and relative paths

Projects use relative paths to locate files associated with the project. For example, when you load a texture, Maya looks first in the project's sourceimages folder. The first time this texture is loaded, the image name uses this as the relative path labelled sourceimage\<image file>.

This way, you can move the file to any project that has the sourceimages folder, that is, contains the same structure. This becomes the relative file path rule. If you load a texture outside of the file path rules, the path becomes absolute , for example, C:\textures\<image file>. You can read the file path rules in the workspace.mel file file.

Tip: If you are not sure where all the relative and absolute files are, move your scene files to a single folder, as Maya searches this by default. In fact, if you delete a folder without using the Project Window, the output files are saved wherever the scene file is located.