Installation and Configuration

Installing 3Delight^NSI consist of downloading the package (available here) and running the installer. Once this is done, you have to load the plug-in in Maya and install a license file if you are installing the paid version of 3Delight^NSI (the free 3Delight^NSI does not require a licence file). These two steps are described below.

Loading the Plug-in in Maya

If 3Delight^NSI is properly installed, the only thing to do in Maya is to load the 3Delight for Maya plug-in. This is done through the Plug-in Manager. To display the Plug-in Manager, select the Maya → Window → Settings/Preferences → Plug-in Manager menu item. 

The 3Delight plug-ins in the Plug-in Manager.

The plug-in extension varies (.bundle, .so and .mll on OS X, Linux and Windows, respectively).

Turn on the Loaded check box next to plugin_3delight_for_maya. After this step, The 3Delight Menu and Shelf will appear in Maya.

Recommended Plug-in Manager Settings 

• If you wish to have 3Delight for Maya automatically load upon launching Maya, turn on the plugin_3delight_for_maya Auto load check box.
• The 3dfmXGen plug-in will be automatically loaded when needed by 3Delight for Maya. It is not necessary to set neither its Load nor its Auto load settings.

3Delight for Maya comes with the following Maya plug-in:

plugin_3delight_for_maya

This is the main plug-in that allows rendering Maya scenes with 3Delight. 

3dfmXGen

This plug-in allows rendering XGen's Interactive Groom Splines nodes. It is automatically loaded when 3Delight for Maya detects that the XGen Toolkit plug-in is loaded in Maya. 

Installing the license file

This is explained here: Determine your host ID, then request and install your license;

Advanced configuration options are explained in the 3delight.config File. 

Information about the supported environment variables is available here. This can be useful for custom installations, but is not generally recommended as it can easily lead to a non-working 3Delight installation and is harder to debug.