Hello,
Could someone please share how to use the pre-built MDL SDK in CLion or in Visual Studio? I am new to pre-built SDK’s and I’ve been facing some problems in integrating it in my project. There is no clear documentation on the process.
Thanks in advance
That should be pretty straightforward.
It’s the same procedure for either the open-source or the pre-built MDL-SDK.
All you need is to add your installation’s MDL-SDK\include path to the Additional Include Directories of your project to be able to include the necessary headers inside your application’s source.
Everything else you need is loaded dynamically at runtime, like the libmdl_sdk.dll, the nv_openimageio.dll or nv_freeimage.dll, dds.dll, shown inside the MDL SDK examples:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/MDL-SDK/blob/master/examples/mdl_sdk/shared/utils/mdl.h#L206
https://github.com/NVIDIA/MDL-SDK/blob/master/examples/mdl_sdk/shared/utils/mdl.h#L325
Used here:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/MDL-SDK/blob/master/examples/mdl_sdk/shared/utils/mdl.h#L431
Copy and adapt those functions to your application framework as needed.
An initialization outside the MDL-SDK example framework can be found in one of my OptiX 7 demo applications using the PTX backend to generate material shader code for OptiX 7:
https://github.com/NVIDIA/OptiX_Apps/blob/master/apps/MDL_renderer/src/Raytracer.cpp#L1571
https://raytracing-docs.nvidia.com/mdl/api/mi_neuray_getting_started.html
should have all the info.
Basically the result of the cmake process is a visual studio solution for the sdk examples. This can also serve as a blueprint for your own solutions.