In my humble opinion, Autodesk should change the way to automate the building of packages for Windows. I've never seen so many errors and requirements to install a very small piece of software like Bonus Tools for Maya.
"Bonus Tools is a free collection of useful Maya scripts and plug-ins. After installing Bonus Tools, users will have a pull-down menu for easy access to the tools that cover all aspects of everyday use: general UI, modeling, animation, texturing, rendering and cloth."
Cool! Unfortunately installing this piece of software on a fresh install of Windows 7 x64 is very hard, at least for me.
Double click on the msi file and the first problem appears:
"The InstallScript engine is missing from this machine. If available, please run ISScript.msi, or contact your support personnel for further assistance."
What's Installscript? It's a system to create Windows setup files:according to InstallShield,, it should keep "customers happy". Actually I'm not happy and Installscript acts like a virus: you can install it, you can't remove it, you have to live with it. No way to uninstall it via Add/Remove Programs or using Windows Installer Clean up.
InstallShield explains here how to determine the version number of the ISScript engine we need, download it, and install it.
Unfortunately I could not use the procedure explained to determine the version number I needed, so I tried it out myself.
Version 8 works for me.
It seems that installing multiple ISScript versions doesn't affect pc performances.
Ok, another problem:
"Registry Error: Module path is empty. Unable to set up Registry details to configure Bonus Tools."
Unable to set up Registry: it seems a problem due to system privileges. I ran a dos command prompt as Admin. I navigated to the location of the msi file and typed:
msiexec /i MayaBonusTools2011_win64.msi
This procedure avoids the registry error. Finally Bonus tools have been installed.
Now I have to figure out how to install them on Vista x86. Other kind of problems on Vista.
