Out Mesh Not supported

[pedroCabrera]

Thanks for this plugin! its amazing! But why we can create Input Mesh paramenters but not outputMesh parameters?

[Eric-Vignola]

At the moment Node Designer only generates an MPxNode derivative we call MPyNode. It is essentially a DG node whose compute function is exposed in the form of an expression. As such it is ok for it to receive mesh inputs but you can't modify/generate meshes or surfaces with it.

To do this and other things we need to extend the plugin to work with the other node types, such as:

• MPxDeformerNode ---> MPyDeformerNode to deform meshes

• MPxSurfaceShape ---> MPySurfaceShape to generate meshes and surface shapes

etc etc...

All of which would follow the same concept: Each node flavor would have the default input and output attribute types allowed by its parent class, and an expression that exposes the compute function pre-populated with variables derived from the node's inputs and outputs.

This would all tie in Node Designer where when creating a new node you'd select the node type you want to make.

[pedroCabrera]

Ok I understand! Are there plans for supporting that so?

I'm planing to integrate this https://github.com/pedroCabrera/PyFlow into maya DG graph with custom Dynamic DG nodes, we are working on a new version of that repo.

How hard do you think it will be to do this stuffs with your plugin:

• be able to add custom PushButton to the MPyNode with custom signals so I can open my graph.
• send pysideQsignals from my custom graph to your MPyNode to add Input and Output pins and send signals from your MPyNode to my custom pyside class.

Thanks!

[gh138]

Hi,
Creating a deformer version of MPyNode is definitely on our current wishlist and has, so far, been a common request from the community. So it could happen soon.

For your other questions, it seems like you want to communicate between the Node Designer UI and the UI in your project, yeah?

Communicating from your UI to Node Designer should be pretty easy because Node Designer is constantly listening for changes to MPyNodes within the Maya scene. So all you have to do is use the MPyNode API to make the changes to nodes in the scene and Node Designer should pick up those changes.
For example, if you're UI ran the following code to add an input attr to all MPyNodes in the scene:

from mpylib.nodes import MPyNode

nodes = MPyNode.ls()

for node in nodes:
    node.addInputAttr("test", "float")

Node Designer would detect that you added a new input attr to all the nodes and automatically refresh itself.
You can find the MPyNode docs here

As far as communicating from Node Designer to your UI, my instinct would be that you would need to get a reference to the running instance of Node Designer and listen for a specific Qt signal.
When Node Designer starts it parents itself to Maya so the current way that we query running instances of Node Designer is to search the child widgets of the main Maya window. Your UI could do something similar and then it could listen for the appropriate signal.
There could be other ways to do this but those are my initial thoughts. Hope that helps!