What's New in API in Maya 2017 Update 2
Rendering
Lighting
If a plug-in light uses the Light classification, and the plug-in light has an Exposure attribute, this attribute is now respected. The Exposure attribute has been added to all light types in the apiDirectionalLightShape devkit example for demonstration.
You can now use the /drawdb/light/image classification to register a plug-in node so that it behaves like an internal IBL (image) light. A application is the aiSkyDomeLight. See Image based lighting.
After registering with this classification, you can then control these lighting attributes: color, envRotationY, sampling, intensity, and exposure.
The Color attribute is mandatory and must be defined; otherwise, your node will appear black.
As an example, the apiDirectionalLightShape plug-in in the devkit now includes an apiImageLightShape image light.
Shading
Added the MShaderInstance::writeEffectSourceToFile() method for debugging custom shader fragment development. Use this method to write the final effect source to a file so you can perform validation on custom shader fragments on all device APIs. To validate your shader plug-in, you can bind a temporary draw context with a shader instance generated from the effect source file.
Compiler requirements for the Mac OS X environment
To compile plug-ins and standalone applications on Mac OS X, you must now have the following installed: Mavericks 10.9.5, Xcode 6.1.1 with SDK 10.9, clang with libc++. For more information see Mac OS X environment.
Plug-in example updates
- A new workspaceControlCmd.cpp plug-in example demonstrates a way to create customized Maya UI that is compatible with Maya Workspaces.
- The footPrintNode/footPrintNode.cpp and footPrintNode_GeometryOverride/footPrintNode_GeometryOverride.cpp examples have been improved to provide better performance in Viewport 2.0 by merging geometry and render items at the plug-in level.
- The
apiMeshShape/apiMeshSubSceneOverride.cpp example has been updated to include the following
MHWRender::MPxSubSceneOverride class virtual functions:
Implementing these functions allows MPxSubSceneOverride plug-ins to return the MDagPath object corresponding to the given MRenderItem provided by Maya viewport selection system, so that DAG objects in the viewport can be selectable.
Maya Developer Kit
The Developer Kit is available online at Autodesk Exchange at https://apps.exchange.autodesk.com/MAYA/en/Home/Index.
Except where otherwise noted, this work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. Please see the Autodesk Creative Commons FAQ for more information.