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Category: Programming

Compiling C++ Plugins for Maya with Visual Studio

Compiling C++ Plugins

This is something I had wanted to do for a very, very long time.

A lot of people end up never learning to write C++ because of the difficulty presented by the ecosystem, despite the fact that the base facilities of the language itself are actually pretty straight forward.
In a similar vein I find the language itself, or its use in APIs, is often taught in an overly isolated fashion when it’s actually pretty important to understand how the tool-chain components (project, compiler and linker) actually work together to write and debug such plug-in’s.

My answer to that is a mini-series that isn’t really about C++ (there are many books and videos about that) as much as it’s about knowing how the system goes from source to binary target: We go from nothing to actually assembling and then building an open source node library without using other people’s projects. Every step is explained in both terms of doing it and what goes on under the hood, with further notes on what components participate and how, including possible issues and early troubleshooting of the various steps.

If you want to learn C++, or even if you don’t want to but you would still like to be able to build many of the excellent open source plugins available out there by yourself, this is the playlist for you.

Extra thanks to all the Patrons on Patreon who gave me the motivation to do it and provided feedback on the work as it progressed and was made before its public release.

Enjoy,