Getting Started

The best way to get started developing a self-installing plug-in is to use one of the Softimage SDK wizards to generate the initial code for your plug-in.

For C++ and C#, the wizards also generate a Visual Studio .NET 2005 project (.vcproj/.csproj), a Visual C++ project (.dsp), and a GNUMakefile.

There are specific wizards for operators, commands, properties, events, filters, and shaders.

To generate the code for an empty self-installing plug-in

1. Click File > Plug-ins to open the Plug-in Manager.

| In the Tools Development Environment layout, click the Plug-ins tab to switch to the Plug-in Manager view.

2. Do one of the following:

- To create the plug-in in the User location, click File > New > Empty Plug-in.

- To create the property in a workgroup or an Add-on directory, expand the location in the Plug-in Tree, right-click the Plugins folder and click New > Empty Plug-in.

The Plug-in Wizard appears.

3. In the Plug-in Name box, type a name for the plug-in.

The first character in a plug-in name should be a letter. Subsequent characters can be letters, numbers, underscore (_) characters, or spaces.

If you include spaces in the plug-in name, the wizard replaces the spaces with underscores when it creates the plug-in file.

4. In the Author box, type a name for the plug-in.

5. In the Script Language list, click the language you want to generate.

6. Click OK to generate the code and open the generated file in a scripteditor.

If you selected a scripting language, the wizard also loads the plug-in. If you generated C++, you’ll have to build the plug-in first.

Autodesk Softimage v7.5