The new features are already available to all customers. Log in to the customers download center and proceed to the beta page. Please read the release notes carefully and be advised that these versions are not meant for production use since they do contain some bugs. But enjoy your new freedom. 
Sometimes it’s really nice to render out an image in wireframe mode. Since Maya doesn’t support this kind of rendering out-of-the-box I’ve searched the net and came across some setups which are either lacking some features or aren’t very artist-friendly. There are some approaches that use UV snapshots as a texture but this can quickly become difficult if you don’t have clean UVs, a high-resolution mesh or maybe want to do a close up on the object. Letting alone the problems you would run into if the tesselation is dynamic and will change over time. Another approach was using the Hardware Render Buffer but this is also a bit inconvenient. There are some more ways to fake wireframe rendering. But I didn’t want to fake it and I really wanted it to be a (nearly) one-click solution. Oh yes, and flexible and backwards compatible and …
Therefore I tried to make things better, easier, faster and came up with a solution that produced the image below. The setup is done fully automatically and all you have to do is apply the material to your object(s).
You can download it from here.
Please obey that only Maya 8 and newer are capable of rendering the polygon outlines. All earlier versions do not support this contour mode but will show the triangulated geometry instead that is being used by the renderer.
As promised some news about this feature. In the upcoming release of Wire there will be another surface type called “Combined Polygons”.
So, what’s the difference to “Polygons”?
In case of all other surface types you will receive an independent object for each extruded wire. When choosing “Combined Polygons” there will be only one mesh containing all extruded wires. This makes using Mesh > Combine superfluous.
Implementing this into Seamour is planned but no release date will be given atm.
Since relying entirely on NURBS surfaces that have to be tesselated afterwards isn’t a good idea, letting alone the poor performance of NURBS creation. I’ve therefore decided to support all surface types out-of-the-box.
Starting with the next release of Wire there will be a drop-down box in the Attribute Editor giving you the possibility to choose the surface type that should be created using the extrude option. The extrusion will be done entirely by the node without using Maya’s extrude node. Therefore it will be possible to switch between surface types on-the-fly.
When using polygons I’m working on a method to, optionally, create a single mesh which would render the Mesh > Combine operation superfluous. But that’s not entirely sure since I’ve to make some performance tests.
After having proven production stable the new extrusion engine will be implemented in Seamour as well.
The upcoming versions of all plug-ins will have a very cool new feature that allows the user to easily replace the input connection of a supported attribute. This means that there is no need to use the Hypergraph anymore.
Example:
You’ve created some very nice objects with Wire but at some point you noticed that the Wire Profile needs to be changed dramatically. There are a few options that are e.g. trying to change the existing Wire Profile but you would rather go and create a whole new one that would replace the old one. Ok, do so. Done? Ok, that was easy but now there comes the tricky part: you need to replace it in the Hypergraph. Open it up, find your Wire node and the appropriate inputs and finally connect the correct output to them. I guess by now you know what I’m talking about.
That’s why here comes the easy version:
All attributes that use an input object will show up in the Attribute Editor like depicted below. Notice the new icon on the far right. That’s what’s been called the ReWire icon.
So in case you wanted to replace the object that is currently connected to the attribute “Wire Profile” with another one, simply click on the ReWire icon and select your new object in the scene. That’s it! The attributes will be connected automagically!
