Around the Corner

Maya 2016.5 Viewport 2.0 on OSX : How to handle the "Current drawing engine does not support legacy viewport" warning

In Maya 2016 Extension 2 (2016.5), you may have noticed that on Mac OS X, Maya would give the following warning message: "Current drawing engine does not support legacy viewport". Maya 2016.5 uses OpenGL API version 4.1( please see the image below). The “OpenGL Core Profile (strict)” is the default rendering engine on Mac OS X which supports OpenGL version 3.2 and above. So, it won’t support OpenGL 2.1 and below features. If you still want to use OpenGL 2.1... Read more →

Advantage and limitation of using MUiDrawManager in VP 2.0

VP 2.0 provides a very convenient way for plugin developers to draw some simple basic UI elements such as lines, circles, arcs, text, …. In Maya 2016, it now provides the ability to support drawing icons. By using MUiDrawManager, plugin developers do not need to consider the different GPU device, it will work for all. MUiDrawManager is very powerful, some developers mention that they are trying to use that as much as possible. Actually, we provide several interfaces for partners... Read more →

Fix your Motion sickness or kinetosis with VR devices

Few months back, I started to work on exploring usage of the Kinect with Maya, but lately was asked to worked on many of the Autodesk Cloud Services implementation and a WEBGL implementation for the Autodesk 3D viewer. While working on this project, I had the chance to try few others things, like a VR experience using the 3d viewer (source code posted here). The 3d viewer technology was not design for VR, nor it was intended to be in... Read more →

Writing an FBX importer / Exporter plug-in

While I am working on a WEBGL project, I wanted to share some hints I had to work through with you. The FBX documentation isn't clear on every steps, is a bit out of date even if it fairly easy to identify the pieces to update and spread all over the place. I hope that post will help on this. The project I am working on is a glTF importer / exporter. glTF is a specification (under development) for WEBGL... 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 →