Readme

This is the readme for the Hot Reloadable Deformer example Maya plugin.

About

This is an example of how to create a Maya deformer that allows for hot-reloading of re-compiled code on-the-fly, without having to unload/reload the library and re-setup the scene.

You can view the full tutorial over here

Building

Requirements

• Maya 2016 (and above) needs to be installed in order to link to the libraries.
• You will also need the devkit headers, which are available from the official Autodesk Github repository.
• CMake 2.8.11 and higher is required for building.
• If you're on Windows, you can also use the build.bat file to build the plugin. Edit the build script to point the paths to your own Maya directories, and then run the build using build.bat debug. It will place the generated binaries in a msbuild folder.

Instructions for building with CMake

• Create a build directory and navigate to it.
• Run cmake ../ -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release and then cmake --build . --config Release --target install. The binaries should be installed in the bin folder. You can switch to a Debug build if you're trying to look at how the plugin works internally and step through the code in a debugger.

Sample code

In MEL:

file -f -new;

unloadPlugin "maya_hot_reload_example";
loadPlugin "/home/sonictk/maya_hot_reload_example/bin/maya_hot_reload_example.so";

polySphere;
deformer -type "hotReloadableDeformer";

Credits

Siew Yi Liang (a.k.a sonictk)