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fluidedge

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Nov 1, 2007
1,365
16
...for a semi noob programmer. I've done a bit of Java and C in my time so i'm not complete alien to it. I want to write a plugin for viewing Maya IFF files and possibly Maya .mb or .ma scene files.

Is this a simple task or not, how long would it take? I think it could be a nice plugin to make as there is one for Cinema4D that is really popular.

Can you sell Quicklook plugins :D
 
I didn't bother to look up the docs on this, but my memory says it goes something like this. . .

The quick look preview for any document isn't necessarily a smaller version of what you see when you open the document in the native application. For files with a graphics context the preview makes sense. For a word processing document you might decide to show the text (but it would be really small) or you might decide to show the meta information (file creation date, last save date, etc.)

Now that you know what you want to display you have to go about gathering that data. I'm not familiar with Maya so I don't know what IFF or .ma or .mb files have in them. If these files contain raw information that needs to be rendered then quick look is not going to be appropriate for this. Apple stresses that the generation of the quick look should be very fast. Give up displaying fine details for speed.

So, you will need knowledge about how the files are stored and how to retrieve the info you want. If you can do this then you just need to create a quick look project and code it up. The executable you create will go in the application bundle of Maya and be used whenever a Maya file is quick looked.

Again. 100% from memory here. I saw how to do this a couple of years ago and haven't had to do one myself yet.
 
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