Around the Corner

Using Maya template for creating deformer UI

Recently, a customer asked a question about creating UI for deformers. The deformer nodes in Maya are created with a table for deformer attributes e.g., But for deformer plugins, if you don’t have an AETemplate assigned for it, it looks like this, which is not as easy to understand and has extra, but unnecessary details… The first thought is about reusing the AETemplates in scripts. Unfortunately, it wasn’t created with MEL and you can’t find it inside of scripts/AETemplates. AETemplate... Read more →

Add your new context in UV Texture Editor

Well, it’s pretty easy to add a command into Maya, and I also believe most of our plugin developers know how to add a context/tool within Maya (Context is actually presented with the name “tool” in Maya), if you are not familiar with that, please refer the Command plug-ins section of help doc for the details. In general, contexts in Maya are modes which define how mouse interaction will be interpreted. A context can execute commands, modify the current selection,... Read more →

Enable component selection for MPxSubsceneOverride of apiMeshShape sample

In Maya 2016 Extention 2, Autodesk has completed the native Viewport 2 implementation, and it is now the main viewport. There are many new APIs introduced and I've already posted a blog about Make MPxSurfaceShape selectable in Viewport 2 that was a different change in Maya 2016 Extension 2. Today, I am going to talk about another change for the MPxSubsceneOverride. MPxSubsceneOverride::getInstancedSelectionPath and MPxSubsceneOverride::getSelectionPath are very important for the native Viewport 2 selection, especially for the component selection. When selecting... Read more →

SIP fix released

SIP v4.15.5 now contains the fix and is available on Riverbank's site. No need to patch the source code anymore. http://www.riverbankcomputing.com/software/sip/download Read more →

Fix for "sip.wrapinstance on Maya main window causes a hard crash"

Few month back, I wrote instructions to build PyQT for Maya 2014, but couple of weeks later someone came with a problem in using SIP with Maya. The issue was that Maya is crashing when someone tries to get the Maya handle and bind it using sip. I.e.: import sip as _sip import PyQt4.QtCore as _QtCore import PyQt4.QtGui as _QtGui import maya.OpenMayaUI as _OpenMayaUI mainWindow = _sip.wrapinstance(long(_OpenMayaUI.MQtUtil.mainWindow()), _QtCore.QObject) Hopefully, a colleague of mine Yves Boudreault investigated the issue and found... Read more →

Applying the Maya Dark Color Scheme to WPF

Sorry it's been such a long time since we all wrote a blog...we will get better at updating!!! As you know I was travelling a lot in November/December for business reasons, but I also got asked to work on few important Cloud and mobile projects lately that took me away from the R&D aspect of my job. Anyway, it is back to normal now… till next time ;) Almost 2 years back, almost around this time of the year, I... Read more →

FBMenu stops working after an exception was raised

When code associated with a custom menu item raises an exception, the menu item can no longer be executed for that session of MotionBuilder. Steps: Load and execute the script below From the New Menu, select 'SubMenu 1' Observe in the Python window that an exception is displayed in the output From the New Menu, select 'SubMenu 1' Observe that nothing is output. from pyfbsdk import * def eventMenu(control, event): raise Exception('kill this menu item') menuMgr = FBMenuManager() menuMgr.InsertFirst(None, "New... Read more →

Maya on .NET

For those of you who are already on the Maya Feedback Community forum (beta forum), it is probably not really new. But for all others, this is quite a big change - Maya will get a native .NET API for its Windows platform version. So I am proud to announce the Maya .NET API here. The Maya .NET API is a new technology that allows Maya plug-in developers to harness the full power of Microsoft’s .NET Framework. With the Maya... Read more →

C++ Qt custom widget to Python

While it is rather easy to create a composite widget using Python and/or a true custom widget using Python (see examples in PyQt distribution /examples/designer/plugins/widgets), it becomes very unintuitive when you use C++ :( For this post we will be using a true custom Widget and go step by step on what you need to do to get it working and exposed in Maya. For this we will be using a clock (with seconds) The first thing is to create... Read more →

Building Qt, PyQt, PySide for Maya 2013 - Part 2

This is a continuation of the previous post and this time we will focus on building PySide. PySide [http://www.pyside.org/ or http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySide/] is a python binding to the Qt library. Because Maya uses Qt internally, you can use the PySide modules in Maya python scripts to create custom UI. PySide does not have the same licensing as Maya, Qt, or Python. Please consult the PySide website for information about licensing for PySide. Download Shiboken & PySide: http://qt-project.org/wiki/PySideDownloads Download Cmake: http://www.cmake.org/cmake/resources/software.html Maya... Read more →

Building Qt, PyQt, PySide for Maya 2013 - Part 1

To complete the article written by Kristine last month, I could not resist to go through the process of building these libraries myself on the 3 platforms Windows x64, Linux and MacOS (I tend not to work on win32 anymore). Unfortunately, the documentation provided by Autodesk isn't always very clear. Not I mean it is wrong or incorrect, but sometimes assumes you either know these Qt underneath requirements and/or Autodesk internal build procedures. Building Qt Whatever you decide to do,... Read more →

Maya API thread safe?

In general it is not safe to assume any Maya API is threadsafe if it is not documented as being so. There can be internal caching or state being set, meaning functions that may seem threadsafe are in fact not. An example is MFnMesh::getVertexNormal(). These normals are evaluated lazily, meaning the first call to this function may trigger a full recompute of all normals, so two calls simultaneously may have bad consequences. One clunky way around this is to do... Read more →

Access the Qt event loop in Maya

Maya uses a customized version of Nokia's Open Source Qt 4.7.1 framework (for Maya 2013). If you want to use Qt in your Maya plug-ins then you will have to use the same modified version as Maya. Most of the Qt modified libs ship with the Maya distribution (located in $MAYA_LOCATION/lib). So in theory you would not need build the libraries yourself unless you need more. Then it will require that you build a local copy of Qt from the... Read more →

Adding a Custom Cursor in MCursor in Maya

To create a custom cursor when using MPxContext::SetCursor, a cursor requires two XBM images: one for the mask, which defines which bits are transparent and which opaque, and one for the color, which defines which bits are white and which are black. If you look at an XBM image file you'll see that it's just a snippet of C code which defines macros giving the width and height of the image, and an array of unsigned char. E.g: #define HtumbleCursorMask_width... Read more →

Convert Maya World Coordinates to Screen Coordinates

Usually you can use M3dView::worldToView() to convert world coordinates to screen space coordinates, however there may be situations where you need to convert them manually, for example, you want to know what the screen coordinates would be even if they are outside the viewport. In this case, you need to convert them manually, vis using the M3dView class method. 1. Let’s say we have the world space point “vertex_corner”, you need to multiply it by the modelView and projection matrices,... Read more →

Avoid Gimbal Lock for Rotation/Direction Maya Manipulators

In the past few weeks, my colleague Naiqi Weng had to work on an issue where someone had a Maya manipulator that contains both a rotateManip and a directionManip, which controlled one single “rotate” attribute. The manipulator was working fine excepted under some specific rotations where the directional manipulator "pops" the object's rotation. She noticed that when this was happening there was two axes on top of each other when looking at the rotateManip and the rotateMode was in "Gimbal"... Read more →

Are you looking to rewrite some of our Maya default scripts?

First things first Happy Canada Day to all my fellow Canadians :) Are you looking to rewrite some of our Maya default scripts? In your environment, likely you will get to the point where you want to customize some of the MEL scripts that either builds the Maya UI or that create the functionality in Maya. To do this it means you will have to rewrite/change some of Maya’s default scripts. Rewrite/Change a MEL script Let’s examine all the ways... Read more →