how do i get rviz to recognize my plugin?

edit

Taken from my question here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/43...

I am missing something as I struggle to get the tutorial rviz plugin to show up within rviz. I have the source for the visualization_tutorials. Within that git repo, there is the rviz_plugin_tutorials. I can successfully build this within a ROS workspace, with the output showing up in rviz_workspace/devel/lib as librviz_plugin_tutorials.so.

I have read that rviz uses pluginlib to load plugins that have the appropriate plugin_description.xml and use the PLUGINLIB_EXPORT_CLASS macro appropriately.

I don't understand how this mechanism is supposed to work. After building the plugin, all you have are the library (.so file) and the package and plugin .xml files. How is running 'rosrun rviz rviz' supposed to allow rviz to find this new library and plugin description file? That's my fundamental misunderstanding. I don't see the tutorial plugin when I run rviz and running rospack doesn't show the tutorial plugin:

honeywell@UGV-Laptop-1:~/rviz_workspace$ rospack plugins --attrib=plugin rviz rviz /opt/ros/kinetic/share/rviz/plugin_description.xml honeywell@UGV-Laptop-1:~/rviz_workspace$

Thanks for any help

EDIT: rviz is running from /opt/ros/kinetic/bin/rviz. Am I supposed to copy my plugin_description.xml and librviz_plugin_tutorials.so somewhere other than where the workspace has them?