Around the Corner

Evaluating Node Attribute

Often in times, when people are grabbing attribute values working with Dependency Graph (DG) Nodes, people stumble across the situation what is the best way to access attribute values. At a first glance, it looks both MPlug and MDataHandle can access attribute values and both of them would work. However there are some caveats that you need to be aware when you choose to use one instead of the other: One distinct difference between MPlug and MDataHandle way to access... Read more →

Maya Profiler

Have you ever wonder why your scene is running so slow? What’s the culprit of the performance degradation? In Maya 2015 extension, we provide a new profiler tool for you to track down performance bottlenecks in your scene by recording the amount of time that each process consumes. We also provide programming interfaces to access this feature. Specifically, in MEL/Python, you can use command “profiler” to start and stop the recording of events, add profiling categories and instrument procedures for... Read more →

How to decide if an input attribute is changed or its value is not valid any more?

When you are working with Dependency Graph and custom node, sometimes in compute() function call you want to check if an input attribute is changed or its value is still up to date. At first glance, the most straightforward approach to tackle this down is to use MDataBlock::isClean(). This function will return false if your attribute value is not valid any more, which means you will need to either retrieve or recalculate a new value on this attribute. However this... Read more →