Getting Start (Maya Issue)

One of the major task of our research topic is to integrate our volume rendering technique with Maya. Different from our previous results, human thermal refraction requires a precise human figure model. Without using Maya, it will leave us tremendous work to get a pleasing image.

On the other hand, even though we have get some experience on Maya plugin development through CIS660, neither of us have tried writing a renderer. Significant amount of time will spend on figuring out how to render a custom geometry, the human figure and the environment which is affected by thermal refraction in our case.

By our research so far, there's a few ways of doing this.

For rendering just single scene entities, there's MPxLocator which is used widely. This creates a new locator type (a scene entity) that we can instantiate in the scene. The MPxLocator class has virtual overrides for draw/bbox/etc. But a more elegant way is to take over the viewport.

For taking over the viewport, it's a bit more complex...

1. MPx3dModelView. This class allows us to create our own viewport type. Once registered and scripted in properly (the examples are provided in the MPx3dModelView docs), we'll be able to select it in the viewport's 'Panels' menu.

This will provide us with an opportunity to perform multiple draw passes and add our own custom draws and such. We see people used it for implementing full screen post processing effects. It becomes more difficult if we want to fully override the draw, as this class doesn't provide us with direct override draw calls per object. It just gives us control over the passes.

2. MPxHwShaderNode/MPxHardwareShaderNode - This will give us a new shader node type using hardware shaders. When the shader is asked to draw, we'll receive our bind and draw calls for which we'll have access to the given shape's vtx/face data and can perform our custom draw there. This is what the cgfxShaderNode is based on.

3. MViewportRenderer - This will give us the full override of the viewport. The downside here is that there are no utility methods to help us render any of the built-in draw functions like the HUD, draw feedback (like artisan brushes), manips, etc. Although it won't be very usable to interact with, we think practically this is useful as a visual feedback viewport.

We decided to use MViewportRenderer as our approach. Maya has provided the OpenGLViewportRenderer plugin in its devkit. It does not come with complete docs. Our next step is to modify existing codes to render a simple voxel buffer.