Natron Installing Procedure and Plugin setup under Windows

[Roberto Giudici]

We freshly installed Natron on Win platform (we tried on Fedora Linux, but the process didn't appear to be straightforward) and we are struggling about how creating a plugin and properly loading it into Natron.

We compiled on Visual Studio 2010 express a .dll file renamed on ofx, but no way to see it recognized under Natron.

Is there any detailed guide for total dummies in Plugin manufacturing ?

We are wondering about the existance of ofxs librairies (ofxsCore) and ofx ones.

Is there any difference ?

Hope to get a feedback soon,

Roberto Giudici

Institut National de l'Audiovisuel (INA)

[Alexandre]

Hi,

If you want a fedora detailed procedure , read the instructions in the file TuttleOFX-Readme.txt located in the source tree repository under Natron/Documentation.

This file gathers procedure for building TuttleOFX and Natron + some basic openfx plug-ins.

On windows this is a completely different thing. There's still no complete automated way on windows but we're working on it.

To compile Natron just follow the instructions in the INSTALL_WINDOWS.md file, I think you already succeeded that part.

Now regarding the plug-ins on windows I will try to detail how they work:

A plug-in is a folder e.g: MyPlugin.ofx.bundle

with the following arrangement :

MyPlugin.ofx.bundle/

Contents/

Win64/

MyPlugin.ofx

Resources/

myimg.png

On Windows the file MyPlugin.ofx is actually a .dll which extension has been changed to .ofx.

The OpenFX repository here (https://github.com/devernay/openfx) is composed of 3 parts:

A pure C part which consist of functions signatures. This defines the interface between a host and plug-ins.

You could theoretically just make plug-ins by using this interface but it would require more lines of code.

In order to help developing plug-ins there's a C++ layer called "Support" which is on top of the C API.

We use the Support layer to make plug-ins, that's how all the plug-in in the openfx-misc repository are developed (https://github.com/devernay/openfx-misc). All the files of the support layer generally starts with "ofxs"

There's another layer in that openfx repository called the HostSupport. It achieves the same goal as the Support layer does on the plug-in side but on the Host (Natron) side. 

The openfx-io and openfx-misc repository are based on the Support layer and they embed the openfx repository as a submodule.

I suggest the first thing you try to do is to compile openfx-misc and then openfx-io (https://github.com/MrKepzie/openfx-io).

For OpenFX-misc all you have to do is load the Visual studio 2010 solution and press build in the Misc project.

For the OpenFX-io repository this is bit more harder because of all the dependancies (FFmpeg, OpenColorIO, OpenImageIO, OpenEXR, etc…) . Follow the instructions, we provide pre-built binaries for all dependencies on dropbox.

Once you successfully compiled the plug-ins there're official locations where the plug-ins should be located so that an OpenFX host can load them.

On Windows 64 bits the location is:

C:\Program Files\Common Files\OFX\Plugins

On Windows 32 bits the location is:

C:\Program Files(x86)\Common Files\OFX\Plugins

On OSX the location is:

/Library/OFX/Plugins

On linux the location is:

/usr/OFX/Plugins

In Natron we bundle some plug-ins with Natron so that when the user downloads the software he or she already has a bunch of plug-ins.

This location is part of the Natron installation. There're options in the preferences of Natron to force Natron to load system wide (i.e the location mentioned above) plug-ins over the one bundled within Natron.

If you want to program your own plug-ins, take a look at the plug-ins in the openfx-misc, they are state of the art of how one should write an openfx plug-in.

Feel free to ask for any help,

kind regards,

Alexandre

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[Frédéric Devernay]

Roberto,
The openfx-misc project on github has installation instructions in the README.MD file. It gives the installation location.
To create a plugin, you have to read very carefully the ofx spec,or take another working example as template. The openfx-misc plugins are probably the best examples you can find (the ones from the ofx sdk sometimes don't follow the spec)
The ofx spec is very dense, and every word counts, really.

We may have to make a tutorial at some point (and you're welcome to contribute)

Fred

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