Maya Viewport 2.0 API Guide

This section provides details on the OpenMaya plug-in interface for hardware rendering as it pertains to the “Maya Hardware 2.0” renderer and its usage for the interactive viewport (“Viewport 2.0”) and batch rendering.

We denote anything “new” as version “2” and anything “old” as version “1”. Version “2” was first introduced with the Maya 2012 release as “Maya Hardware 2.0” renderer. It can be used as a batch renderer or in the viewport under the name “Viewport 2.0”.

Thus, in part, this document also serves as a transition guide from the old rendering interfaces to the new.

A Maya Viewport 2.0 whitepaper is also available at http://www.autodesk.com/developmaya. This document is divided into two parts. The first (Viewport 2.0 API Porting Guide) is an overview of Viewport 2.0 and outlines the differences between the legacy default viewport and Viewport 2.0. The second part (Viewport 2.0 API Porting Guide Details) is more detailed and specifies the recommended interfaces and provides code examples for common tasks.