Use projects to manage all the files associated with a scene.
Because scenes can depend upon multiple resources from different locations, projects let you keep track of the files related to a scene by storing them in one location.
To set a project
Setting a project creates a directory structure of the folders associated with your scene. Some of these folders are scenes, templates, render data, and source images folders. There can be multiple subfolders in the root project folders. See Project subfolders, below.
A workspace.mel file is also created and added to the project. See Workspace.mel file.
Each time you open or save a file, Maya searches in the Scenes folder of the currently set project folder. As a result, it is good practice to set a project every time you start working on a new file, even though it is possible to browse and save outside of the project folder. See Projects and relative paths below.
Projects are useful when you are working with a team or over multiple computers because once you set a project, your scene assets are organized in one location. So, for example, if you sent a colleague a scene file, it would not have the textures or scripts that are associated with it. If you sent the project file instead, when your colleague opened the file, Maya can find all the related files needed to work on it. And since all the files are in one place, working with scenes in Projects makes it easy to create backups. See Share a Maya Project.
You can find the location path of a project you are working on if you open the Project Window (File > Project Window). The Project Window tells you the folder that each type of resource will be saved to.
You can review the rules set for the File Path in this window. You may want to edit a file rule if you have multiple projects that use textures from a single location.
For more about setting a project, watch a video here: Setting a Maya project.
Projects use relative paths to locate files associated with the project. For example, when you load a texture, Maya looks first in the project's sourceimages folder. The first time this texture is loaded, the image name uses this as the relative path labelled sourceimage\<image file>.
This way, you can move the file to any project that has the sourceimages folder, that is, contains the same structure. This becomes the relative file path rule. If you load a texture outside of the file path rules, the path becomes absolute , for example, C:\textures\<image file>. You can read the file path rules in the workspace.mel file file.