I am available for tool development if needed. I have extensive experience in most areas of the application as both a user and developer. I have experience with the SDK via scripting and C++, and have also written many mental ray shaders. Before you groan on mental ray, remember other tools use mental ray behind the curtains, such as rendermap and ultimapper. So don't think strictly in terms of rendering final full frame images.
As others have mentioned, there are limits to what can be done. Many features in Softimage were never completed, while others have bugs. The biggest issue is some hooks are missing to do the really ground breaking stuff people want to integrate. For example, the SDK does not support the ability to define custom ICE node ports as references or locations. Just about any serious ICE node you'd want to develop requires at least one of those two features. The regular SDK does not support custom topology operators as has been discussed in the past. Softimage real time viewport uses OpenGL 4.2 and DirectX 9. Those are limiting factors for performance in shading. To bypass those limits, you'll need to use the custom display host, but it has very limited ability to notify the external tool what is happening inside of Softimage to react properly in context of the user experience. Python is kind of shoe-horned into the application and isn't functional in all areas. Therefore, most significant feature development usually requires the heavy lifting be done outside the application then brought back in. While that makes the application functional, it comes at a performance cost. The exception to the rule is an exporter such as establishing a bridge to another renderer, for example. In that case, you're just spitting out information. If you merely want to accelerate existing features by packaging multiple mouse clicks into a button or providing an alternate UI, then in general there shouldn't be any problems. Matt ------ Softimage Mailing List. To unsubscribe, send a mail to [email protected] with "unsubscribe" in the subject, and reply to confirm.
