Around the Corner

Maya 2020 API update guide

The guide is based on What's New in the Maya Devkit in Maya 2020 with some extra info. Check the Maya documentation for the most up to date information. For Mac users, Apple has introduced notarization since OS X 10.14.5 and it is going to be enforced for Applications after 10.15. It requires the host application to declare entitlements for the plug-ins. Although Maya is the parent application, you should be aware that it may cause your plug-in to fail... Read more →

Maya 2018 Devkit is on ADN extranet now

This is a quick update for Maya 2018 Devkit since our partners are asking about this. I am sorry for the late, but the Maya 2018 Devkit is available on our ADN extranet now, if you are ADN member, you can download it there directly. We are also working on to upload it to Autodesk App Store and Maya Developer Center, I will update the progress here. Read more →

Maya Devkit 2018 is on the way

This is a short update regarding the Maya 2018 devkit. As-is typical for the devkit, it can take a few days to get it posted after our Maya product release. We are awaiting the official release from engineering and they have told us it should be ready in the next few days. Once we receive it, we will get it posted ASAP. Please check back here for the latest information. Thank you for your patience. Read more →

New API changes for Maya 2018

Another big time for the 2018 release of M&E products, the following products are released on July 25: Maya 2018 Arnold SDK 5.0 MotionBuilder 2018 Mudbox 2018 Entertainment Creation Suite Ultimate 2018 Maya Entertainment Creation Suite Standard 2018 3ds Max Entertainment Creation Suite Standard 2018 Maya 2018 with Softimage For our 3rd party developers, it means you should check out the new APIs and upgrade your plugin to support the latest versions. If you are in our Beta forum, you... Read more →

How to write an Arnold Translator for MPxSurfaceShapes

If you are wondering why your fancy geometry created with MPxSurfaceShape is not working in renderers like Arnold, then this article is for you. Before rendering them, you'll need to create a translator or shader for your renderer. For Arnold, it can be handled using extensions. To make a 3rd-party plugin work with Arnold, you'll need to write translator extension for it.There are three SDKs you are going to refer to in your project. Arnold SDK, mtoa SDK and Maya... Read more →

Suggestions & Best practices while migrating your plugin to Parallel Evaluation

As we know, starting from Maya 2016, Maya introduces a new evaluation model that enabled better utilization of computer resources by distributing computation over all available cores and taking advantage of GPU compute power. Unlike previous versions of Maya, which was limited to node-level parallelisms, Maya now includes a mechanism for scene-level analysis and parallelization. For example, if your scene contains different characters that are unconstrained to one another, Maya can evaluates each character at the same time. At the... Read more →

Use a node as input for your custom node

Sometimes we want to use a node as input for our custom nodes, and would like our custom node to be updated whenever our input is changed. Usually, we will create a message attribute with MFnMessageAttribute on our custom node and register callbacks to deal with it. The message attributes will never participate in dirty propagation, it is only for making connections. For example, sometimes we would like to connect a camera to our custom node and update it with... Read more →

New API changes for Maya 2017 updates 2

Some of you may already know about this, but I think I still need to emphasize it again here. In the past, we used to have Service Packs and Extensions after the Maya main release. But starting from Maya 2017, we will not provide Service Packs or Extensions any more, instead, will use Maya Updates to maintain and update the software regularly, providing new features, and quicker fixes to customer issues. For our plugin developers, one important thing you should... Read more →

Render Setup improvement in Maya 2017: Interactive Sequence Rendering

The last main improvement for Render Setup feature is actually a new feature to render a sequence directly from Maya’s UI without executing a batch render (including support for loading the sequence in the Renderview for review), thanks to engineering team’s contribution, here is the detail if you are interested: Introduction Rendering of image sequences in Maya has traditionally been an offline process for the end-user via command-line or the batch render feature in Maya. This can be limiting for... Read more →

Render Setup improvement in Maya 2017: Render Settings Changes

The 2nd main improvement is about changes to render settings window callbacks to support the new workspaces UI feature, as I mentioned before, this information is also provided by our engineering team. Let’s take a look at the improvement. Introduction One of the changes introduced in Maya 2017 is the new workspaces feature. This feature includes a change that presents some problems for the Render Settings. Maya now retains the state of windows that were open in previous sessions of... Read more →

How to create a Super sampling render override - a tutorial for MRenderTarget usage in MRenderOverride

Recently we were asked how to implement super sampling for a viewport render override. It requires you to create new render targets to replace the original ones. The MRT sample is very good at showing how to do it, however it is too complex to begin with. So we'll create a new one based on the simplest sample - viewOverrideSimple. The full code can be found on GitHub here. The original sample has three render operations: scene, HUD and present.... Read more →

Render Setup improvement in Maya 2017: Support for AOV setups per layer and inclusion of AOV setups in exported templates

As you know in Maya 2016 Extension 2 we introduced the replacement for Maya render layers called “Render Setup”, during that period we introduced this feature to several 3rd party renderers in person. For Maya 2017 we have been making improvements to this feature that will allow for improved support for 3rd party renderers, and other recent changes have the potential to impact 3rd party renderers as well, will talk about the 3 improvements in the following separate blogs, and... Read more →

Two quick API tips for Maya - image sample in devkit and registerCommand in Maya 2016.5

We have encountered two simple API changes recently, but they each can cause some confusion. Image Sample issues The first one is the image extension sample in Maya devkit. It is used for creating image extension for adding extra image format support in Maya. It is located in devkit/image folder. It appears above mentioned sample and its document haven't been updated for a while, and there are two small issues inside of it. Imf.lib is renamed to imfbase.lib now and... Read more →

Support XGen Interactive Grooming feature in your plugin

Starting from Maya 2017, the Maya team introduced a great improvement to the XGen feature, called “Interactive hair and fur grooming with XGen”. The improvement provides a full range of tools, including sculpting brushes, modifiers, and sculpting layers, dedicated to creating all styles of hair and fur. Interactive grooming descriptions and modifiers are Maya-based nodes, and therefore they can be manipulated in the Node Editor. The cool thing is that these nodes are computed on your system's GPU instead of... Read more →

Maya Extension Attributes

Extension attributes are really helpful when plugin developers want to add more attributes to a plugin without modifying the existing plugin code. In Maya, there are many ways to add/remove the extension attributes like MEL way, Python way and C++ API way as well. MEL Way to add/remove extension attributes: To add extension attribute, use addExtension command To remove extension attribute, use deleteExtension command To list only extension attribute of an object use "listAttr -ex object" Example: // Create unknown... Read more →

Add your new context in UV Texture Editor

Well, it’s pretty easy to add a command into Maya, and I also believe most of our plugin developers know how to add a context/tool within Maya (Context is actually presented with the name “tool” in Maya), if you are not familiar with that, please refer the Command plug-ins section of help doc for the details. In general, contexts in Maya are modes which define how mouse interaction will be interpreted. A context can execute commands, modify the current selection,... Read more →

Light Draw Override in Viewport 2.0

If you use MPxDrawOverride class to override the draw of your custom locator class, you will have to register the draw override as below: static MString drawdb("drawdb/geometry/light/customLight"); static MString sDrawRegistrantId("customLightDraw"); plugin.registerNode("customLight", customLightNode::m_id, customLightNode::creator, customLightNode::initialize, MPxNode::kLocatorNode, &drawdb); MHWRender::MDrawRegistry::registerDrawOverrideCreator(drawdb, sDrawRegistrantId, MCustomLightDrawOverride::Creator); However, if you want your locator to be classified as light with the same drawdb as above, Maya won't treat your locator as light, because the above drawdb string is applicable only for geometry override not for light. The node will... Read more →

Compiler versions for Maya 2017

This is an update on previous posts for older versions which can be found here: Maya 2016 Extension 2, Maya 2016,Maya 2015, Maya 2014, Maya 2008 to 2013. Basically, the build environment of Maya 2017 does not change, it’s same as Maya 2016 extension 2, and also almost same as Maya 2016. The main change for Maya 2017 is the version of Qt and PySide, the details are listed as follow and the updated ones are marked in red with... Read more →

Maya 2017 devkit - Building Qt plug-ins instructions

For the Qt plug-ins, these are the recent changes made that are not reflected in the documentation but are important to know. Using the qmake executable and its qt.conf file from the devkit archive is recommended. The use of this qt.conf file uses MAYA_LOCATION and DEVKIT_LOCATION to locate the expected header/library files. Therefore, users must set both environment variables before building the samples. DEVKIT_LOCATION should point to the directory where the devkit include, mkspecs, cmake directories are located. After running... Read more →

MFn::kFluid and MFn::KFluidData attribute connection and limitation

We can create an attribute(typed attribute) using the following Maya C++ API MFnTypedAttribute has 2 overload methods for creating attribute. MObject create (const MString &fullName, const MString &briefName, const MTypeId &id, MObject defaultData=MObject::kNullObj, MStatus *ReturnStatus=NULL) MObject create (const MString &fullName, const MString &briefName, MFnData::Type type, MObject defaultData=MObject::kNullObj, MStatus *ReturnStatus=NULL) Here is the sample code MObject fluidType::outGrid; MStatus stat; MFnTypedAttribute tAttr; outGrid = tAttr.create("outGrid", "ogd", MFn::kFluid, MObject::kNullObj, NULL); if (outGrid.isNull()) cerr << "object is null" << endl; tAttr.setWritable(false); tAttr.setStorable(false); If we... Read more →

OpenColorIO Library Issues

The OpenColorIO library is a third-party library from Sony Pictures and it is opensource code found here. Through the Maya 2016 Extension 1 release, OpenColorIO library is included with the Maya release. The Maya customized OpenColorIO library is statically linked with the SynColor library (ie. SynColor.dll on Windows). Note that the OpenColorIO library supports all platforms as OpenColorIO.dll in Windows, OpenColorIO.so in Linux and OpenColorIO.dylib in OSX. If you download and build OpenColorIO on your own and then link with... Read more →

How to make your plugin node as thread-safe for parallel DG Evaluation

Take this example: Let’s take very simple DG setup. A locator whose transform is connected to two compute nodes (spliceMayaNode1 and spliceMayaNode2), each of which computes something heavy. The results are then added together in a third node (spliceMayaNode3) from the plugin, and that result drives a locator. The nodes use dynamic attributes so you have to use setDependentsDirty() to declare the outputs that are affected by which inputs. If you comment out the code that adds plugs to the... Read more →

How to connect Perception Neuron with Maya (Part 2)

In the last post, I talked about the NeuronDataReader SDK and the general process to use these APIs, now we will talk about how to make a Maya plug-in client to receive and parse the animation data. With this project, we are going to create a Maya plug-in which will: fetch the animation data from Axis Neuron application to Maya, create a Neuron specific skeleton, and assign the animation data to the skeleton, retarget the animation from the skeleton to... Read more →

Maya 2016, Parallel Evaluation and New API’s

When you start Maya 2016, you will automatically be in parallel evaluation mode. This is new default evaluation mode, replacing the legacy DG-based evaluation. Maya 2016 uses the DG’s dirty propagation mechanism to build the Evaluation Graph(EG). Dirty propagation is the process of walking through the DG, from animation curves to renderable objects, and marking attributes on DG nodes as needing to be re-evaluated (i.e., dirty). Unlike previous version of Maya that propagated dirty on every frame, Maya 2016 disables... Read more →

Registering a plug-in to work with Maya archive

To add external dependencies to the archive created by Maya with "File" --> "Archive Scene", a plug-in developer needs to implement the MPxNode::getFilesToArchive() method. The documentation is [here](http://help.autodesk.com/view/MAYAUL/2016/ENU/?guid=__cpp_ref_class_m_px_node_html). This will add the plug-in node's external dependencies to the archive. While you are at it, you can add any file paths to Maya’s File Path Editor UI using this command: filePathEditor –registerType "myNode1.filePath" –typeLabel "Custom" If you wish to add the external dependencies to metadata in the Maya file itself, use... Read more →

Maya compiler versions (update)

This is an update on previous posts for older versions which can be found here: Maya 2015, Maya 2014, Maya 2008 to 2013. Maya 2016 Windows 64bit Win7x64 Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 + Win 8 SDK .Net framework 4.5.1 Intel Composer XE 2015 Initial release (15.0.0.108) Linux 64bit RHEL/CentOS 6.5, FC20 gcc 4.8.2 Intel Composer XE 2015 Update 1 (15.0.1.133) Note: For our internal builds on RHEL/CentOS 6.5, we use Red Hat DTS 2.1 to have gcc 4.8.2, plug-in... Read more →

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 →

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 →

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 →

Maya compiler versions (update)

This is an update on a previous post for older versions which can be found here. OS Compiler Maya 2015 Windows 64bit Win7x64 Visual Studio 2012 Update 4 Intel Composer XE 2013 Update 5 (13.1.3.198) Linux 64bit RHEL/CentOS 6.2, FC14 gcc 4.1.2 Intel Composer XE 2013 SP1 Update 1 (14.0.1.106) Mac 64bit Mountain Lion 10.8.5 Xcode 5.0.2 with SDK 10.8 (Mountain Lion) clang with libstdc++ Intel Composer XE 2013 SP1 Update 1 (14.0.1.103) Embedded Python 2.7.3 - Internal to Maya... 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 →

Applying the Maya Dark Color Scheme to WPF

Sorry it's been such a long time since we all wrote a blog...we will get better at updating!!! As you know I was travelling a lot in November/December for business reasons, but I also got asked to work on few important Cloud and mobile projects lately that took me away from the R&D aspect of my job. Anyway, it is back to normal now… till next time ;) Almost 2 years back, almost around this time of the year, I... Read more →

How to check for error for MDataHandle::child()?

First if you're using the MPlug version, it cannot fail but if you're using the MObject version and if it fails, it would return an empty MDataHandle. I.e. equivalent to: MDataHandle tmp ; and its type() method should return you kInvalid. Unfortunately, if the child attribute is also a compound attribute, type() would also return kInvalid. So what's up? in order to keep MDataHandle operations fast in Maya, minimal checking is performed, which for most methods means no checking at... Read more →

Announcing the Autodesk Exchange Apps Portathon – and an opportunity to receive US$100 per app published!

We are excited to announce the inaugural Autodesk® Exchange Apps Portathon – a 48 hour virtual web based coding “festival”. The Exchange Apps Portathon is a community event where you’ll have the opportunity to work closely with Autodesk engineers in real time and meet hundreds of other Autodesk software partners from around the world. It is all designed to help you get your apps ready and published on Autodesk Exchange Apps. The Portathon will run for 48 hours, starting from... Read more →

New Maya C++/C#/Python plug-in Wizards

This topic was suggested by one of our ADN members who had problems to setup his Mac OSX environment for building a Maya plug-in on the Mac. I quickly replied by a post here to mention what compiler / environment to use on the Mac since the Maya 2014 documentation is wrong (it actually still reference the Maya 2013 compiler / environment whereas it changed for Maya 2014). More important, you should better not upgrade to Mountain Lion if you... Read more →

Maya compiler versions (update)

This is an update on a previous post for older versions which can be found here. OS Compiler Maya 2014 Windows 64bit Win7x64 Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Intel Composer XE 2011 Update 11 Linux 64bit RHEL 6.0, FC14 gcc 4.1.2, Intel Composer XE 2011 Update 11 Mac 64bit Lion 10.7.4 Xcode 4.3.3 with SDK 10.6 (SnowLeopard), gcc 4.2.1, Intel Composer XE 2011 Update 11 Embedded Python 2.7.3 - Internal to Maya Embedded PySide 1.1.2 Qt 4.8.2 Boost 1.47 TBB 4.1... Read more →

Localization strategies for 3ds Max Plug-ins

With the coming localized Autodesk Exchange stores, it is becoming more important for plug-in developers to localize their software. The exchange store provides a unique opportunity to be in front of customers all over the world. The best experience for a customer is to provide your software in their localized language. This post is meant to provide the resources to help you understand the localization of 3ds Max plug-ins and supporting customization files. C++ based plug-ins 3ds Max is now... 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 →

Distributing plug-ins/files on Maya (and 3ds Max)

You probably remember this article where I described in details how to work with Maya Modules and integrate your files and plug-ins in Maya. This time, I am going to explain what changes were made in Maya to support the Autodesk Exchange Store. To submit an application / content package on Autodesk Exchange Store, you need to follow few but important rules. The application should be self-contained and easy to install for example. Self-contained means that all files should go... Read more →

a New Distribution Channel for Maya & 3ds Max

With the release of Maya 2014 and 3ds Max 2014 the Autodesk Exchange site makes it easier for plug-in, content, and tutorial developers to distribute and sell their content more easily to Autodesk customers. This is a new channel to make new customers and does not necessarily means that you have to switch from your existing distribution channel to this one entirely. You should really see that as a new oportunity for you and your future customers to work together.... Read more →

Using the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring a basic point cloud into Maya

Today’s post presents a very basic implementation of a point cloud – essentially equivalent to the code in this previous post – which makes use of the Microsoft Kinect SDK to bring the Kinect color image on a Maya image plan live. While for an image it was pretty straight forward to take the Kinect color image and use the Maya API MImage class to read that image. This time we are interested to get the depth information out of... Read more →

Initial fooling around with Kinect and Maya

In a previous post, we talked about the Maya device API and mentioned I may try and write a device plug-in for the Kinect. There is few things I want to try with the Kinect: Some simple model capture using the Kinect’s RGB-D camera Generate a point cloud Simple gesture-based control And finally using the latest Kinect Fusion SDK create object meshes The first seemed a fun approach to test out the Kinect interface, although ultimately the currently-available precision (the... Read more →

Can my custom node survive to delete

When you use MDagModifier to delete the last shape under a transform, the transform is automatically deleted as well. That is the normal Maya behavior. It helps to keep the scene clear of orphaned transforms and is consistent with MDagModifier::createNode(), which will automatically create a parent if none is specified when creating the node. However, you need to know that MDagModifier::reparentNode() would not delete empty parents when that happens. And the 'delete' command doesn't behave the same way since it... Read more →

Never ever use "unloadPlugin -force"!!!

I would encourage everyone to completely avoid use of the MEL command "unloadPlugin –force pluginName" or its Python equivalent cmds.unloadPlugin("pluginName", force=true). And, especially when writing vital tests. The force flag of the unloadPlugin is a documented (and almost guaranteed way) of creating dangling pointers. Here's what Maya's User Manual has to say about it: Unload the plug-in even if it is providing services. This is not recommended. If you unload a plug-in that implements a node or data type in... Read more →

MotionBuilder eventAddPose callback called twice

The reason that the eventAddPose callback is called twice is because the new pose is connected to the scene and to the folder that contains the pose. Just check the lEvent.DstPlug pointer and only consider the event when the DstPlug is the FBScene. Note that for the eventUpdatePose callback, you may receive it because the scene image thumbnail shown in the pose tool is connected to the pose. However, there is no really good way of finding out that a... Read more →

Maya on .NET

For those of you who are already on the Maya Feedback Community forum (beta forum), it is probably not really new. But for all others, this is quite a big change - Maya will get a native .NET API for its Windows platform version. So I am proud to announce the Maya .NET API here. The Maya .NET API is a new technology that allows Maya plug-in developers to harness the full power of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. With the Maya... Read more →

C++ Qt custom widget to Python

While it is rather easy to create a composite widget using Python and/or a true custom widget using Python (see examples in PyQt distribution /examples/designer/plugins/widgets), it becomes very unintuitive when you use C++ :( For this post we will be using a true custom Widget and go step by step on what you need to do to get it working and exposed in Maya. For this we will be using a clock (with seconds) The first thing is to create... Read more →

No 64bit integer attribute in Maya? no way!

Ok, but where is it? If you take a look to the Maya API documentation you will find a lot of things about 64b support, but the only classes specific to 64b will be: the MUint64Array which is an array of MUint64 data type, the MFnUInt64ArrayData class which allows the creation and manipulation of the MUint64Array objects for use in the dependency graph when the MDataHandle::type() method returns kUInt64Array. The MFnUInt64ArrayData / MUint64Array / MUint64 classes are present in the... Read more →

November’s Plugin of the Month live on Autodesk Labs: MASH nodes

Another month, another plugin. :-) As announced over on Scott’s blog a few days ago, the latest Plugin of the Month is now live. MASH is a suite of Maya nodes, developed in-house at Mainframe, aimed at enabling their artists to create versatile 'motion design' style animations. It offers a selection of effector nodes which can be daisy-chained together to generate a wide variety of customizable effects. It's fully controllable from both Maya's Attribute and Node Editors. MASH has been... Read more →