Around the Corner

ADN Devdays @ AU Las Vegas 2014

Back from HackZurich, one of the Hackathons we are sponsoring this year. The winners had a good VR solution based on WebGL for viewing, 2 smart phones to create a stereo camera. That was neat... Once again, we will present the ADN Developer Conference - DevDays on December 1st (the day before AU) where 3ds Max and Maya engineering will introduce the new APIs in the upcoming releases and DevHack, a drop-in programming workshop on December 2nd. We will also... Read more →

Now Announcing 3ds Max and Maya 2015

I've just arrived home from a 30-day trip to the Bay Area and Neuchatel. It was a really interesting trip – as usual – but I'm happy to be home (even if I’m writing this on a Sunday morning, once again trying to catch up on many things you cannot really do while travelling). The release happened really few days ago and it seems timely for me to talk about the updates more from a developer’s perspective. This year you... Read more →

Accessing "unsubdivide" functionality from a Mudbox plug-in

Unfortunately, the rebuild subdivision levels functionality isn’t directly exposed through the SDK, but it is possible to call any menu item in Mudbox (including this one) via Qt. So what you will want to do is: // build a list of geometries you wish to operate on. QList aGeos ; // you populate this list. // get a pointer to the QMenu widget for the mesh menu QMenu *pQ =Kernel ()->Interface ()->DropDownMenu (Interface::ddmMesh) ; // Enumerate over the menu... Read more →

Maya, 3ds Max, SoftImage, Mudbox, MotionBuilder 2014 for developers

Following the new "origami" theme Tomorrow will be the first day where the 2014 family of Autodesk products will be available around the world. You’ll no doubt find lots of information on the interwebs regarding the product’s features (including the AREA), so I’m going to focus specifically on the opportunities – and requirements – the new release presents to developers. Firstly, ADN members should refer to the (as ever) thorough information produced by the ADN team and posted under the... Read more →

123D Creature

123D Creature is a creative modeling App that lets you build, sculpt, paint, render and 3D print original 3D characters directly on your iPad. You can check out a teaser video on YouTube here App Store page with features and additional images here Read more →

Vote for Visual Studio x64 Edit-and-Continue

A colleague in one of our product development teams pinged me today to ask for my support in voting up this request for Microsoft to implement x64 edit-and-continue. I’m sure this isn’t the first time this topic has been raised with Microsoft – but hopefully it will be the last . I went ahead and added my votes. And what’s a blog for, if not to nudge your readers into helping each other out once in a while . I... Read more →

STL Export plug-in for Mudbox

While it is not an official feature of Mudbox, there is an STL (stereolithography) exporter plug-in included in the Mudbox 2013 SDK. While you can compile it from scratch, it is released pre-compiled: Windows: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Mudbox 2013\SDK\plugins\STLExport.mp MacOS: /Applications/Autodesk/Mudbox 2013/SDK/plugins/libSTLExport.dylib Just copy it to the main plug-in folder: Windows: C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Mudbox 2013\plugins\STLExport.mp MacOS: $HOME/Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Mudbox 2013/Plugins/libSTLExport.dylib or /Library/Application Support/Autodesk/Mudbox 2012/Plugins/libSTLExport.dylib You will now have STL as a support file format from the “File > Export Selection ...” menu item. This... Read more →

Registration open for AU 2012

I registered for AU 2012, a week ago as the AU site was opened for employees for testing. It is now open for anyone to register to attend and receive an early bird discount of $500 (before October 15). If you’re interested in seeing what classes are scheduled for this year’s AU – which will be held from Nov 27-29 in the Mandalay Bay Hotel, Las Vegas – you can browse the class catalog online. Here are the classes I’m... Read more →

Coming on Autodesk Labs… “Plug-in of the Month”

This is less an announcement of something we’re doing than it is a call for input (or perhaps a cry for help? ;-). For the last 3 months, we started posting plug-ins on Autodesk Labs containing a “plug-in of the month, brought to you by the Autodesk Developer Network”. The plug-ins we’re providing will be simple productivity enhancing tools and utilities that streamline the use of one of our products. The drivers behind this are to a) solve customer problems... Read more →

How I Plan a Tool…

This post isn’t super technical but more of peak into my thought process when creating tools, I think it is worth sharing and I would love to have other’s feedback if you have other thoughts that work for you. I was once asked by an attendee from one of my Maya API trainings if I could share some wisdom with them about writing a tool. How do I plan my work? How do I start thinking about the way I... Read more →

What do I mean by a “handle”…?

Through my years at Autodesk/Alias, I have done a lot of teaching and education (some is recorded and some is not), but some things you might catch me saying during training are… “Now you get the handle to the object”, or “this now returns the handle to the object”, but what the heck does that really mean? I will know try to explain my colloquialism below using MotionBuilder Python SDK code as an example. A Handle in Programming Terms What... Read more →

Mudbox compiler versions

Lots of talk about Maya recently, but to reflect my post on compiler versions for Maya, here is a list of the various OS and compiler you would need to build plug-ins on Mudbox. Note that Mudbox plug-ins are C++ only compared to Maya. But Mudbox uses CG and Qt a lot, so most of the time you would need to support those too. OpenGL is also an option. Visual Studio Express compiler is not officially supported, but less the... Read more →

Expose your code to Python - Deploy & Consume

If you want to know in details follow that link - or use this tools But since Python is already installed on your Maya (or MotionBuilder) distribution, it is fairly easy to distribute your Python 'module' onto other machines for these products. However depending on what you did while compiling your module, you may run into couple of issues. It is never simple, isn't it? let's take the simple approach and we see the downfalls later. In case you did... Read more →