Around the Corner

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 →

How to connect Perception Neuron with Maya (Part 1)

Last year, our team backed project Perception Neuron with 2 full set of Neuron Motion capture devices, and with some delay and some manufacturing issue, finally, around the end of last month, I received the devices. It was just around my birthday, so I consider them to be my birthday gift ;) The device looks well manufactured, well packaged, with simple but enough information about how to start playing with it. The Quickstart Guide at https://neuronmocap.com/quickstart is well written to... Read more →

Don't perform heavy tasks in the MoBu Real-time engine thread, even if it worked before

Recently we received a question about crashing while calling FBPlayerControl::GotoStart() from within a real-time device engine thread. It seems working fine up to MoBu 2014, but crashes in MoBu 2015. Actually, it seems working fine in previous MoBu releases, but as the best practice, it’s not recommended because the SDK documentation clearly mentions that some methods like DeviceIONotify() and DeviceEvaluationNotify() are called by the Real-time engine thread, and they should consume as little CPU time as possible and return as... 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 →

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 →

Building pywin32 for MotionBuilder 2015

Recently a customer came to ask why pywin32 do not work on Maya or MotionBuilder. The answer is very simple, Maya and MotionBuilder are compiled the lastest compiler to get the best performances and the latest technology possible. Maya itself is partially compiler with the Intel C++ compiler and Visual Studio 2012 SP4, whereas MotionBuilder uses Visual Studio 2012 SP4 only. The issue is that pywin32 and many of the Python libraries still use an older compiler, like sometimes the... 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 →

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 →

3ds Max and Maya SP1 debug available now.

What are symbols? Symbols or Program Database Files (PDBs) are a by-product of the build process and contain debugging information for specific binary modules (e.g. exe or dll files). By default, a C++ PDB file contains the following information: Public symbols (typically all functions, static and global variables) A list of object files that are responsible for sections of code in the executable Frame pointer optimization information (FPO) Name and type information for local variables and data structures Source file... 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 →

Include or precompiled

Usage of precompiled headers may significantly reduce compilation time, especially when applied to big header files or header files that include many other header files or header files that are included in many translation units. And when you consider template files, that will save you even more time. The beauty of precompiled headers is that even if most of the time they are made per project, they do not have to. You could create a precompiled header (pch for Windows,... 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 →

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 →

Python debugging in Maya

With the power of the Maya API and the scriptability of MEL, Maya Python hits a sweet spot in Maya's suite of development tools. Being an interpreted language it allows for quick turnaround, making it perfect for rapid prototyping and with thousands or dedicated users around the world contributing modules to Python, Maya inherits a large and growing array of new capabilities. However, debugging Python code in Maya has not made to be easy like it is with C++ and... Read more →

Lost in classes

Both my class and Kevin's one at AU aren't yet full. If you haven't registered yet and going to AU, please give a stop to our classes, I promiss you'll not be disapointed. But for this you also need to register to these classes. There’s more detail on the class timing & description here: Using .NET Programming in Autodesk® Maya® Wednesday, Nov 28, 10:00 AM - 11:30 AM Kevin Vandecar, for the ADN M&E team will also be presenting in... Read more →

Building Qt, PyQt, PySide for Maya 2013 - Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous post and this time we will focus on building PySide. PySide [http://www.pyside.org/ or http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide/] is a python binding to the Qt library. Because Maya uses Qt internally, you can use the PySide modules in Maya python scripts to create custom UI. PySide does not have the same licensing as Maya, Qt, or Python. Please consult the PySide website for information about licensing for PySide. Download Shiboken & PySide: http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySideDownloads Download Cmake: http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html Maya... Read more →

Building Qt, PyQt, PySide for Maya 2013 - Part 1

To complete the article written by Kristine last month, I could not resist to go through the process of building these libraries myself on the 3 platforms Windows x64, Linux and MacOS (I tend not to work on win32 anymore). Unfortunately, the documentation provided by Autodesk isn't always very clear. Not I mean it is wrong or incorrect, but sometimes assumes you either know these Qt underneath requirements and/or Autodesk internal build procedures. Building Qt Whatever you decide to do,... Read more →

Maya API thread safe?

In general it is not safe to assume any Maya API is threadsafe if it is not documented as being so. There can be internal caching or state being set, meaning functions that may seem threadsafe are in fact not. An example is MFnMesh::getVertexNormal(). These normals are evaluated lazily, meaning the first call to this function may trigger a full recompute of all normals, so two calls simultaneously may have bad consequences. One clunky way around this is to do... 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 →

What’s New in the FBX 2013 SDK?

The FBX SDK animation system has been completely redesigned. Take nodes, take node containers, current takes, and FCurves have all been replaced by animation stacks (FbxAnimStack), animation layers (FbxAnimLayer) animation curve nodes (FbxAnimCurveNode), and animation curves (FbxAnimCurve). The classes in the FBX SDK have all been renamed using the "Fbx" prefix, instead of "KFbx" or "K". All structures have also been renamed with the same prefix, including global functions and enumerations. We did this to make the SDK simpler and... Read more →

What’s New in the MotionBuilder 2013 SDK?

Programming Environment and Code Refactoring Changes MotionBuilder and its distributed plug-ins are now compiled using Visual Studio 2010 (Service Pack 1). FBContainer has been renamed to FBVisualContainer for uniformity of cross-product naming schemes. const correctness improvements. Although not enforced in this release, we recommend that the "H" prefix in classes such as HFBPlug be removed and replaced by the pointer suffix "*", for example: FBPlug*. This change is intended to facilitate the use of the documentation system in the near... Read more →

Maya compiler versions

Like promised the other day, here is a complete map of compiler and libraries used by Maya OS Compiler Maya 2013 Windows 32bit Win7 Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Intel 12.0.4.196 64bit Win7x64 Visual Studio 2010 SP1, Intel 12.0.4.196 Linux 64bit RHEL 6.0, FC14 gcc 4.1.2, Intel 11.1.073 Mac 64bit SnowLeopard 10.6.8 Xcode3.2.1 gcc 4.2.1, Intel 11.1.089 Embedded Python - Internal to Maya 2.6.4 Qt 4.7.1 TBB 3.0u7 DirectX SDK June 2010 MR 3.10 Linux base build is RHEL 6.0/CentOS 6.0... Read more →

Compatibility of Maya plug-ins between releases

This is a huge topic, so I'm not going to be able to do it justice in this one post. Plug-ins developed using Maya's APIs need to be ported and tested on each major releases to make sure they work with a new release of the Maya platform. For several generations of Maya we have consistently broken binary plug-in compatibility every major releases. To make plug-ins work on interim hotfix, service pack, they might need minor porting work to migrate... Read more →