Custom Maya Shader Plugin development

[dougal2]

Having had a good browse of the sunflow source (jViolet related curiosity), I notice they have a Maya plugin.
It immediately occurred to me that this might be an interesting way to learn about Maya plugins and how building one might benefit us.
Particularly with setting up shaders, it'd be nice to have shaders that have the exact indigo parameters. Well... see attached.

NB: I am not considering this in active development at the moment. Also, due to the binary nature of plugins, and the software I have available to use this is only ever likely to be very experimental.

[vux]

it will be only for windows?

[dougal2]

I only have Maya 2008 at home, on a 64 bit machine.

So, it's likely to only ever be specific to Maya 2008, 64bit, windows or linux (providing i can get it to compile under linux).

I have access to Maya 8.5 on 32bit windows at work, but these machines have no c++ compilers installed.

[dougal2]

On second thoughts, I'm going to learn how to do this in Python instead. It'd then be cross-platform cross-version and won't even need compiling.

[dougal2]

update: got the basics working in python as a scripted plugin, and an AETemplate to go with it.

even though this is quite exciting, I really ought to finish jViolet first...

[vux]

good work...

Python is GOOD choise for this type of plugs

[dougal2]

The custom indigoShader is almost complete. The bump map and exponent map fields are missing because I'm not sure how to implement them yet, and the exporter script needs a whole load of new code to recognise this shader.
However, apart from that the node works fine.
(It doesn't do anything when rendering with Maya though, it just paints objects with a flat colour.)

[raul1968]

I have maya 2008, I can't afford a newer version. Did a plug-in ever come about?