Automatic SPDL?

[renderman]

Hey everyone-

Here a question for the supah-genius coders out there.
Since the biggest roadblock for translating Maya/MR plugs
to XSI seems to be the fact that XSI needs an SPDL file...

Is there anyway to code an "Automatic SPDL" generator?

It would make it possible to take any Maya/MR plugin
that would normally be compatible with XSI to be directly
used by the artist, instead of waiting (and bothering) a code
genius to make the SPDL for us XSI geeks.

Any thoughts?

[Saturn]

you use the spdl wizard to generate your spdl.
You can find it in the plugins manager

[renderman]

Hi-

Thanks for the reply. Yes, I know about the wizard, I was
actually thinking more about something that would "read"
the file and generate the needed calls to an SPDL by itself,
without having to use the wizard (or really without having
any artist input at all).

I know of nothing that exists to do this now, I wanted to
know if it was even possible. There are some guys I know
who could code it if it WAS possible. Before I ask them
to do it, I wanted to know if anyone knew if it was
a fools errand or might be possible with some effort.

Thanks again, though, for the reply.

[DigiDragon]

If you only want to know if it is possible:
Yes, it is. :-)

Not that difficult. You need a lot of different mi files to test everything, then perhaps one or two days to get a rough tool which should work.

I know it is definately possible the other way round and don't see a reason why it should not be possible from an mi file to an SPDL.
Problems would be the UI. Maya has an UI file, which is not as easy to read as the SPDL UI part. Don't know about MAX, how they handle the UI.

[renderman]

Great! Thank you for the information. It's much appreciated!