new plugins for Maya 2017

[mailrox]

The most recent versions of the Substance plugin are merely available for Maya 2019. Unfortunately, not all of us can update Maya so often. There are many circumstances where one has to keep a working version for a couple years. I am aware of the extra effort, but I hope you can compile also up to date plugins for older versions of Maya, in my case Maya 2017. Thanks in advance 

[Galen Helfter]

Hi mailrox,

Right now, we only compile the plugin for Maya 2018 and 2019, with the most recent release 1.4.1 out for both of those versions. We only plan on supporting the most recent two versions of Maya. 1.3.0 was the last version that was build for 2017, which can be found on the Substance in Maya page https://www.allegorithmic.com/integrations/substance-in-maya

1.4.1 can also be downloaded on that page for Maya 2018.

For the 2.0.0 release, which will be next, we also only build for 2018 and 2019, as for that we'll continue to only support a couple of the more recent versions.

[mailrox]

Hope you will change your mind later on. At the moment, my main concern is that with newer versions of Substance Designer we will also see new types of sbsar files one cannot load using the older plugin versions.

[Galen Helfter]

Yes that will be sooner rather than later, those new types of sbsars will be in the substance engine v7. Engine v7 should coincide with Designer 2019.1. The engine v7 sbsars will support outputs that are not images. With an almost complete rework of the Maya plugin done, the current plugin will likely never support those new features.

A request has been to release source code for the plugins. We've discussed it some internally, and if we do that, then the community could build the plugin for versions of Maya that we wouldn't deploy to. I have no timeline or commitment on that, though.

[Mr.Nour.Almasri]

We are on maya 2017 side also , it's sad we can't use the new plugin with it .

[mailrox]

Indeed, it would be a wonderful move if we could get the new 2.0 plugin for Maya 2017.
Galen mentioned that, at least, there is the idea to release the source code for the plugin.
Please help us. In many production environments one cannot regularly switch to the
most recent Maya versions.

[mailrox]

Possibly it is helpful to notice that for many longtime Maya users the version 2017 was the last one which came with a permanent license. This makes this version special and, as with the Adobe CS6 edition, many people still use it because the later versions of Maya haven't seen too many new features.

[Galen Helfter]

If many people are asking for a version for Maya 2017, then I think we should consider it for a future release.

[mailrox]

Great, that would be fantastic. 

[mailrox]

OK, I see that even the new plugin is only for Maya 2018 and 2019...sad to see this missing interest in wishes we formulate.

[Galen Helfter]

Maya 2017 is something we attempted, but it is not simple. It could likely easily be done for MacOS and Linux, but Maya 2017 on Windows expects Visual Studio 2012, which does not have full C++11 support. This makes it not simple to support on Windows.

I think it could still be done, but it would take more time than building forward to 2020, 2021, etc. would take.

[mailrox]

Of course, this makes it more complicated to compile the full Maya 2017 version of the plugin. However, possibly there is a way to get at least a major part of the features from newer 2.0.+ plugins. You would certainly help some of us quite a lot.

[Galen Helfter]

If it's done, it would be all or none, it doesn't quite work that way in pieces.

There's still some more things that can be tried to backport it, and they may work, but I'm uncertain how stable they'd be. We'll have to do that and test.

[mailrox]

Dear Galen, I cannot say anything but thank you very much for taking this into consideration.

[mailrox]

This said a word of clarification would be much appreciated. I really hope NOT to see the argument
that "now that Maya 2020 has come out we definitely no longer care about Maya 2017".

In fact, most of the companies producing Maya plugins I know, like Redshift, Chaos Group, ZIVA VFX,
Nextlimit, Golaem Crowd or Renderman offer plugins for even much older Maya versions.