Our first CrowdFX-related case in Product Support!

A customer reported that CrowdFX wasn’t working. When he opened a sample CrowdFX scene, he got all these “plug-in is not installed” errors [Hey, that’s the same error I blogged about yesteday, but this time it’s something different–Steve]

// ERROR : 2356 - This plug-in is not installed: CrowdFX_RigProxy
// ERROR : 2356 - This plug-in is not installed: CrowdFX_SkeletonsCloud
// ERROR : 2356 - This plug-in is not installed: CrowdFX_ActorProxy
// ERROR : 2356 - This plug-in is not installed: CrowdFX_ActorsProxies
// ERROR : 2356 - This plug-in is not installed: CrowdFX
OpenScene("C:\\Program Files\\Autodesk\\Softimage 2013\\Data\\XSI_SAMPLES\\Scenes\\ICE\\CrowdFX_Walk_Along_Paths.scn", null, null);

The real clue was an error logged at startup:

// ERROR : Traceback (most recent call last):
// File "<Script Block 2>", line 55, in XSILoadPlugin
// in_reg.RegisterMenu(C.siMenuTbICECrowdFXActorsID,"Actors_Menu",False,True)
// File "C:\Python26\lib\site-packages\win32com\client\__init__.py", line 168, in __getattr__
// raise AttributeError, a
// AttributeError: siMenuTbICECrowdFXActorsID
// - [line 54 in C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Softimage 2013\Addons\CrowdFX\Application\Plugins\CrowdFX_Plugin.py]

First, this shows the customer is using the version of Python 2.6 installed on the system (not the version shipped with Softimage). More importantly, it shows that the CrowdFX constants, like siMenuTbICECrowdFXActorsID, are missing.

For Python, all the Softimage constants like siMenuTbICECrowdFXActorsID are cached in the Python install folder. For example, the Softimage constants are cached in the folder C:\Python26\Lib\site-packages\win32com\gen_py\269C4D8C-E32D-11D3-811D-00A0C9AC19A9x0x1x0\__init__.py

The solution in this case was to zap (delete) the gen_py folder, forcing Softimage to regenerate the generated type info cache.