Softimage 2015 SP2 and MS Visual Studio 2017

[Daniel Brassard]

Hi everyone,

Quick question to confirm.

The Softimage 2015 SDK advise to compile C++ plugins for Windows to use the development environment Visual Studio 2012 Update 4.

I have Softimage 2015 R2 SP2, can I use MS Studio 2017 instead of 2012 as it is no longer available on the Microsoft website?

(I want to compile some shaders for NVidia OptiX, tall order I know.)

[Daniel Brassard]

Well I found a response from Microsoft C++ Team on their blog here:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/vcblog ... r-toolset/

You can start using Visual Studio 2017 today without having to change your toolset version (i.e. the current compiler and the matching target CRT).
Visual Studio supports native multi-targeting and round-tripping:

* Native multi-targeting is the ability of the latest IDE to build using toolsets installed by previous versions of Visual Studio (VS 2008 and up).

* Round-tripping is the ability of the latest IDE to load projects created by a previous IDE version without making any changes to the project assets (VS 2010 projects and up), thus allowing it to load back in the previous IDE too.

Using these features means that you will be taking advantage of the latest IDE features in VS 2017 without also taking advantage of the latest advances in the C++ compiler, libraries and build tools (e.g. build throughput). Disclaimer: there are IDE features that also depend on the latest toolset capabilities and they will be incompatible with older toolsets: e.g. type information will be missing in the Memory Profiler, and the refactoring operation “Convert to Raw string literals” will generate C++11-compliant code, making it not compile with VS 2012 compilers and older.

The problem is that you need the older version VS 2012 to be installed as well in your machine. Bummer.

[rray]

Good to know, thanks for the update. I think I compiled plugins successfully with VS 2015 at one point, shaders should work the same I guess.

[Daniel Brassard]

I will try to compile with VS2017 and see if it work. I try to download VS2012 from MS Developer site (I have an account) but I keep getting an error unfortunately. Look like MS has removed the older version.

Too bad because both CUDA 10.0 and OptiX 5.1.1 libraries can be compiled with VS2012 from the onset. I have both libraries compiling examples in VS2017 and working on my system (directly not thru Softimage yet). GPU Ray Tracing and Rendering on my 1080Ti is sweet. You can even compile for RTX cards using the new OptiX 6.0 version but that is for another time.

No rest for the wicked!

[AceMastermind]

There is a working official Microsoft link to "Visual Studio 2012 Update 4" (offline installer/ ISO) here:
https://www.kunal-chowdhury.com/2013/11 ... tml#topic2

[Daniel Brassard]

Thanks AceMastermind,

The link you provided work very well.