The case of the dotXSISceneConverter that wouldn’t load into Maya

In this case, a customer installed Crosswalk for Maya, but he got “Unable to dynamically load dotXSISceneConverter.mll” errors when he tried to load the plugin.

// Error: line 1: Unable to dynamically load : C:/Program Files/Autodesk/Maya2013/bin/plug-ins/dotXSISceneConverter.mll
The specified module could not be found.
 // 
// Error: line 1: The specified module could not be found.
 // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get controlCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get modelEditorCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get command list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel : Failed to get constraintCommand list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: pymel.core : Failed to get depend nodes list from dotXSISceneConverter // 
// Error: line 1: The specified module could not be found.
 (dotXSISceneConverter) // 

Now, this is pretty much the same error you get in Softimage if your PATH is missing the C:\Program Files\Common Files\Softimage location. That’s where the main Crosswalk DLL is installed. To verify this, I fired up Dependency Walker and loaded dotXSISceneConverter.mll (the Maya Crosswalk plugin). And sure enough, I saw that the Maya plugin depends on Crosswalk_2013.0.64.dll (the other errors are for Maya DLLs, so they can be safely ignored, and anything about IESHIMS.DLL can always be ignored).

So the fix is to add the missing Common Files\Softimage path to the PATH environment variable. The Crosswalk installer is supposed to take care of adding C:\Program Files\Common Files\Softimage to the PATH environment variable, but in this case, it apparently didn’t.