B2 – Assembling, Compiling & Analyzing the plugin.

Ok, so last technical blog post( B1), set out to describe the software that is actually going to perform the main 3 – dimensional tasks in Autodesk Maya. That was the “what”.

Now it is over to the “how”. I have assembled the source files for the original  plugin. I then set up the Visual studio environment using the project property settings I learned from  MayaPluginWizard, which is available from here. I  tweaked them a bit to be able to compile the .mll Plugin – file. Here’s how( I am linking to my own website here for a somewhat more lengthy introduction : Compile. This step can take some time but I am moving on to the Visualization of the code, since compiling will always yield different challenges for people on different hardware and software.

So, the end of this post starts to visualize the source code of Genr8 and its dependencies. Click here to view dependency graph generated in Visual studio from the solution of the debug compile of the code.( If using Firefox make sure to open with… internet explorer -IF you do not have a working xml-plugin for your Firefox version).

Also, to supplement this, it is a good idea to start mentally visualizing the hierarchy of the classes, and also its members. A non –  expanded class diagram and also an expanded version provided here. To get down to the gritty part of cataloging and appreciating the code, I have made an interactive model for showcasing the exact source code files of the original plugin.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *