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Path Remapping with Environment Variables
Larger facilities may use environment variables to locate various files, as a way to ensure consistent file locations across machines and machine types. The Flame exporter can take advantage of those. If you’ve never heard of environment variables, or don’t use them, you don’t have to bother reading this, they aren’t at all necessary, just an optional feature for those that need it. You can see what variables are defined with the “env” command in a terminal window.
The idea is that an environment variable such as FLAME_PROJECTS can be defined to give a file location on one machine, such as /Volumes/DATA/FlameProjects on a macOS machine, and maybe F:/FlameProjects on a Windows machine.
When the Flame exporter stores filenames, it checks them to see if they fall in any of the environment variables, and if so, saves the filename citing the environment variable and the subfolder and file within that. The receiving machine does the reverse, replacing the tags with the value of the environment variable on that machine.
This all happens behind the scenes, but you must tell SynthEyes what environment variables to look at, which is done on the ‘Integrate with Flame’ control panel. Up to three environment variables can be listed, using the “Env. Variable name” fields.
As a further convenience, you can define a default value, in case the environment variable is not set. This can allow you to export for a Flame artist’s environment variables, even if they aren’t set up on your own machine.
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