What's New in Evaluation and Performance

Additions to MDGContext

New methods have been added to the MDGContext class to help better manage the current evaluation contexts. These methods include:

• MDGContext::current() lets you determine the current context being used for evaluation.
• MDGContext::isCurrent() lets you determine if a context is currently being used for evaluation.
• MDGContext::makeCurrent() sets a context to be the current evaluation context.

Added a new MDGContextGuard class, which lets you use a scope object to modify evaluation context for a sequence of context-related calls.

See Evaluation using current context for more information.

Classes updated for current context evaluation

A number of methods from the following classes have been deprecated and replaced with current context versions.

• MPlug
• MRampAttribute
• MPxTransform
• MPxNode
• MFnTransform
• MPxAssembly

See Evaluation using current context for more information.

MProfiler additions

New methods have been added to the MProfiler class that allow plug-in writers to export a recording to either a .json or a .csv file, which can then be visualized in a spreadsheet or webpage, independently of Maya.

These methods include:

• MProfiler::getThreadDuration()
• MProfiler::eventDataAvailable()
• MProfiler::recordingActive()
• MProfiler::resetRecording()
• MProfiler::setRecordingActive()
• MProfiler::saveRecording()
• MProfiler::loadRecording()
• MProfiler::isDataFromFile()
• MProfiler::getNumberOfCPUs()

MEvaluationNode and MPxNode

The MEvaluationNode class is now exposed in the Python API.

The MPxNode class MPxNode::preEvaluation() and MPxNode::postEvaluation() virtual methods are now exposed in the Python API.

Drawing performance

• The drawing performance of simple plug-in shapes (such as locators) associated with MHWRender class override interfaces (and optionally using MUIDrawManager) has been improved. These improvements have been added the following:
  • MPxDrawOverride
  • MPxGeometryOverride
  • MPxSubSceneOverride
• The following footPrint devkit examples have been updated to demonstrate the best practices for optimizing performance.
  • footPrintNode
  • footPrintManip
  • rawfootPrintNode
  • footPrintNode_GeometryOverride
• A new footPrintNode_SubSceneOverride devkit example demonstrates how to implement sub-scene overrides for locator objects.
• Added the MOpenCLInfo::supportsDoublePrecision() method to check for GPU double precision support.