Around the Corner

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 →

How to import/export Render Setup with Python

Render setup is very useful for managing render layers and it can import and export render layers for later usage. However, the information on how to import/export it in Python is quite sparse. After doing some research on our testing code, I found that it is quite easy. There is renderSetup.decode and renderSetup.encode for import and export, respectively. The prototype for decode is decode(jsonObject, importOption, optionalPrefix), where - the jsonObject is the json string you'll need to import; - the... 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 →

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 →

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 →

Drawing and Selection tips in VP2.0

We have 2 options to draw the icon/geometry in VP2.0. The first one is using MUIDrawManager object, and another one is MRenderOverride. If you are developing a plugin using Maya node, both MUiDrawManager and MrenderOverride objects are available at any point in the implementation. One issue is that if you are trying to draw the geometry/icon in a callback like postRenderMsgCallback(), VP2.0 would already have finished the drawing at that time, and the MUIDrawManager object won’t be available. In this... Read more →

Setting up Maya Hardware 2.0 using MEl/Python

Changing the render setting in Maya is straight forward, you can change the Hardware renderer very easily using Maya Render settings Window as you could see in the below image. But, how do you achieve the same thing using script code? If you execute the following code, you will see that Maya renders using "Maya Software". mel.eval('render -x 600 -y 800 "Render_Cam"') or the same code as just MEL, Maya still renders using "Maya Software". In addition to the above... Read more →

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 →

How to remove the white outline in the RenderView

The MRenderView::updatePixels API has an annoying side-effect of showing a white outline. For example, calling it in the default way on a rectangle will show it like this: There is an undocumented API available that can alleviate this problem. You can call the MRenderView::setDrawTileBoundary(false) method after startRender and it will disable Maya from drawing the outline. Unfortunately, this API is currently marked for deprecation. But we have discussed this with our engineering team, and they agree it is an acceptable... 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 →

DynamicLighting & FrustumCulling in MotionBuilder

If you want to manually specifying Shadow Caster Culling during render pass, you could use the following functions on FBModel. This will give you control per model instead of a global control. /** Acquire no frustum culling request. * \return Current no frustum culling request count after function call. */ int NoFrustumCullingRequire(); /** Release no frustum culling request. * \return Current no frustum culling request count after function call. */ int NoFrustumCullingRelease(); You can also use the ShaderPassTypeBegin()/End() to turn... Read more →