MAYA_PRESET_PATH is an abortion of shame.

Today the animation lead asked me to make a set of MentalRay render settings presets available for everyone.

One would think that this:

MAYA_PRESET_PATH

Defines the location for Maya presets. Each entry in the path points to the directory above the attrPresets directory.

Would mean what you think it means.

But, that's for a completely different preset API, one defined purely for the attribute editor and actually implented in MEL. The nodePreset built-in command used by the render settings window to build its preset list completely ignores MAYA_PRESET_PATH. So instead of setting an environment variable, I have to copy a preset into everyone's home maya/2009-x64/presets directory.