How to add plugins on MacOS

[Ben_QuadGroup]

Hi,

Recently we took the time to compile our TVPaint plugin (QuadPype) on macOS (this give us a .dylib) we tried to add it on the plugins folder of the mac "TVPaint Animation 11.5 Pro.app" package but this don't work, and inside this plugins folder we can see default plugins compiled for windows build.

Still on macOS (TVPaint 11), in the UI menu of TVPaint Windows the menu entry Plugins is not listed.
EDIT: on TVPaint 12 the "plugins" entry exists but no plugin listed.

So the question is can the macOS version of TVPaint load plugins (as .dylib for example) ?
If not, can you determine the complexity of allowing the load of plugins on macOS (for TVPaint 12) and check if this could be added to your roadmap.

Thanks

[ematecki]

Hi,

You have to compile your plugins as a macOS bundle.
See the examples Xcode projects in the SDK.

In TVP11 the plugin Entry doesn't show when empty, but if a plugin is detected it will appear.
In TVP12 we changed it to always show.

DON'T FORGET to use INTPTR instead of DWORD if your plugin was written some time ago.
In older SDKs (32 bits only) DWORD was used for about anything...

[Ben_QuadGroup]

Thank you for the clarification, we made the necessary changes to our CMakeLists to generate a bundle and successfully got the plugin working on TVPaint 12.

But no luck for TVPaint 11.5.3, even the existing bundle shipped in the SDK archive isn't recognized by TVPaint 11.5.3, maybe we didn't place the plugins in the right place, or something else is not working.

We will give a shot with the latest TVPaint 11.7 version today.

[ematecki]

The precompiled plugins shipped with the SDK are WAY too old to run on any recent Mac...
They are 32bits only and universal binary... universal as PowerPC(!) and Intel...

[Ben_QuadGroup]

So, after more testing the .bundle plugin work well on TVPaint 11.7 and 12 but isn't detected on TVPaint 11.5.3 (sadly)

Since the studio use TVPaint 11.5.3 if we want mac users to use our pipe we will need to upgrade to 11.7 or 12