This weekend I've been working on a viewport renderer that integrates into Maya 8.0. I want to use exactly the same rendering code as the standalone viewer app uses. But since my viewer isn't quite the most stable app around (demo's don't have to be stable :)), I didn't want to execute my rendering code in Maya's process. (Since a crash or a memory leak in my own rendering code would probably completely crash Maya). So for that reason I've implemented my viewport renderer as a client/server setup, where I have a renderer-server running in the background and Maya serving as a client requesting for the rendering of frames. Communication is done through named pipes. The renderer server renders its frames into a piece of shared memory which Maya displays into its viewport. I haven't actually implemented the rendering yet btw. The current renderer only clears the screen to green :) (but it already uses DirectX to do this)

Ohw and I've been looking into wxWidgets and wxFormBuilder. I'm getting tired of designing windows and dialogs using crappy Win32 resources. And wxWidgets really looks promising. I've spent almost my whole sunday afternoon building, testing, crashing, linking and rebuilding wxWidgets and my nerve plugins before I found the magic combination of library build flags that didn't crash Maya or wxWidgets... (grmbl) Anyway, I finally have wxWidgets integrated into my maya plugin. And my first wxWidgets powered dialog is already up and running :) (although it doesn't do much yet)

On to the next step: build the actual renderer.