JustinFX.com

Coding, FX, And Just Random Stuff

                 


© 2023 Justin Israel. All rights reserved.

Switching from Wordpress to Hugo

Sun, Nov 8, 2015
Since 2006, my small blog has existed as a Wordpress site. This worked really well for me, as it was easy to hit a one-click install from a hosting dashboard, and then be able to install plugins, themes, and updates, all from the Wordpress admin. Ultimately it was one less thing vying for my time as opposed to a custom site from scratch. With limited free time, and a choice of projects to work on, the last thing I really wanted to do was website design and maintenance.

Comparing performance of Qt smart pointer options

Sun, Jun 7, 2015

There are a number of sources of information on the usage and behavioral differences of the many “smart pointer” options offered by Qt. But one thing I couldn’t find enough information on were the performance characteristics.

South Park “going-away” book gift

Wed, Dec 19, 2012
On my last day of work at South Park Studios, my co-worker Tory gave me a present. It’s a book that collects together a history of doodles and graphics, capturing significant moments during my 4 year run with the team. Tory tends to represent our team as dog characters. I can be identified usually by the pierced chin. Much of this content refers to inside jokes, but I feel it also has a number of generally hilarious imagery.

Tutorial: PyQt4 UI Development for Maya

Fri, Oct 12, 2012

PyQt4 UI Development for Maya

Just released my 3rd python-based online training video through cmiVFX.com

Introduction

This tutorial is about learning PyQt4 python bindings for the Qt Framework, and how to introduce new UI elements to Maya as a platform.

Python 2.7.2 serializer speed comparisons

Wed, Jul 25, 2012

In a recent python project where I was sending multiple messages per second of data over a basic socket, I had initially just grabbed the cPickle module to get the prototype proof-of-concept functioning properly. cPickle is awesome for easily serializing more complex python objects like custom classes, even though in my case I am only sending basic types.

Getting started with XBOX 360 Kinect on OSX

Thu, Jun 21, 2012
A recent project of mine involves research and development with an XBOX 360 Kinect Sensor. Being a python guy, I started searching for python bindings to some OSX-supported framework. When you just get started looking into this area it can be a little confusing. There are a number of layers to the software stack to enable one to accomplish anything meaningful. This is just a short and general blog post outlining the basics of what I have discovered thus far, to help anyone else that might also be getting started.

Write My Code For Me

Sat, Apr 14, 2012
Permalink – writemycode.net In the spirit of a very similar blog post, I decided to expand upon a specific area of that article… Consider a question like this: I want to do this. Create 10000 files, (filename can be just combination of time and random number). File size should be 4k. And I want to time this. say how many seconds it will take. How can I do this on bash?

Apple Macbooks and Unexplainable LCD Screen Flicker

Mon, Dec 5, 2011
I had just received my brand new MacBook Pro a few days ago. Amazing machine. Probably the best laptop I have ever laid my hands upon. It was the early Feb 2011 model so I got a crazy good deal. But something caught my eye that I just had to investigate… I’m a bit obsessive when it comes to small issues that I can’t resolve, and this is just still bothering me.

Mixing PyQt4 widgets and Maya UI objects

Mon, Nov 21, 2011

A question came up in the Maya-Python mailing list that I thought was a really good topic, and should be reposted.

Someone asked how you can create maya UI objects and embed them within your main PyQt application. Specifically he wanted to create a modelPanel and embed it so that he would have a camera view within his own PyQt window.

Installing PyQt4 for Maya 2012+ (osx)

Thu, Nov 10, 2011
This is a follow up post to my previous one on Installing PyQt4 for Maya 2011 Recently while putting together my next video tutorial for Python for Maya, I came to a section where I wanted to demo PyQt4 in Maya2012. But I was concerned that viewers would have to go through the complicated steps of building PyQt4. I noticed that other people have made available precompiled PyQt installers for windows (here) but I could not find any for OSX or linux.

Go language for python programmers

Thu, Jul 28, 2011

Preface

I’ve been programming in python for over 5 years now, and I love the language a lot. I would look for any opportunity to accomplish my coding tasks using python, as opposed to learning new languages. PyQt4 for user interfaces, Django for web design, etc… And when python just isn’t an option, I have done my share of php, javascript, objective-c and so on.

Recently I started thinking that I should probably expand my programming knowledge a bit to make myself more marketable.

Installing PyQt for maya 2011 (OSX)

Sat, Jan 8, 2011
Update: I am now hosting a built package for Maya2011: MyQt4.7.4-maya2011-x64-osx-10.6.pkg And for Maya 2012+, see: Installing pyqt4 for maya2012 Personally, when trying to run PyQt from within Maya 2009 / 2010 using the pumpThread method, I never had much luck. The best I ever got was the ability to bring up a dialog but not without locking up the UI, even though the pumpThread tool is meant to address that.

AtomSplitter source code released

Fri, Oct 8, 2010

We finally decided to release the source code for AtomSplitter, since we were getting some feedback that the application builds weren’t 100% working on every possible system.

Maya, and self-intersecting nurbsCurves

Mon, Aug 9, 2010
This is a story about my journey in solving a problem at work involving curves. The solution seemed really simple at first, but because of a stupid Maya issue, this turned into me having to rewrite the tool 3 times before I discovered a surprising solution. The Problem: Because we rely heavily on the process of importing Illustrator .ai files into Maya as nurbsCurves, we constantly have to deal with curves that intersect themselves.

Film Jam Podcast Interview

Thu, Aug 5, 2010
I recently did an interview with my friends on their show, Film Jam. Its a podcast dealing with the film industry from the perspective of 3 guys working their way up the ladder. Fantastic show up ’till this point. Hopefully I don’t break the cycle Please make sure to leave a review about the show via iTunes! Episode #20 Playlist page

PyQt4: phonon… and on… and on

Fri, Mar 19, 2010
“App’ing up” PyQt… ugh. One of biggest problems with PyQt is distributing it in a stand-alone package. Even worse… wanting to make your Qt plugins still function (Phonon, jpeg, etc). At work I constantly had this battle, along with my co-worker Tory. She actually has a long-standing issue with this, and had to resort to workarounds or half fixes. Here is Tory’s original post regarding the issue . I would see an error similar to this when trying to package up and run an app using the Phonon module.

SouthPark: A crazy little interface. The TaskMonster.

Tue, Mar 16, 2010
I get to do a lot of interesting applications at SouthPark. This one in particular was the most challenging use of PyQt that I have experienced to date. The backstory…. The art department wanted a tool to help them track assigned tasks, the progress, and to share media and notes associated with the tasks. Furthermore, they wanted to be able to skin the interface with custom graphics to make it their own.

PyQt: Overloading/Ignoring events on widgets

Wed, Mar 10, 2010
You know when you have all these widgets laid out in your class, and you are hooking up all the connections, and you say “Aw dammit I have to subclass QLabel now just so make it ignore blahEvent”? You end up with all these little widget subclasses, where all they are doing is ignoring an event. I noticed I was doing this a few times, in more than one of my classes, and finally got annoyed for the last time.

Python API for XML/SWF Charts (Flash Graphing)

Fri, Jan 15, 2010
I had a project where I was designing a statistics reporting site, to track production stats. I wanted to have really nice graphs that pulled from the database and were somewhat live and interactive. XML/SWF Charts is this awesome flash-based app that lets you embed graphs in your pages which receive their data from XML. There are tons of graph types and ways to customize the look. http://www.maani.us/xml_charts/index.php So, the thing is… I wanted to use Django for the site.

Failed… hard

Tue, Jan 12, 2010

I never thought I had known such a real sense of failure until today, when a system diagnostic became intent on showing me just how hard of a failure we will be experiencing together.

chanToFbx tool released through cmiVFX

Mon, Dec 7, 2009
chan2fbx

I had received a mailing list email from cmiVFX, where Chris Maynard was challenging the community to write a tool that could convert a nuke camera .chan file to a functional FBX format. This was apparently meant to compliment the new 3d camera tracker in NukeX. So I decided to take on the challenge.

My fake grandmother…

Wed, Nov 18, 2009

This is something that started back in 2006, when I received an email from one Miriam Israel. This Miriam claimed to be my grandmother, and proceeded to ask about details in my life that were not my details, and not my life. I thought a simple case of mistaken identity was made and informed her briefly that she had the wrong person. And I asked her to please remove me from her address book. Unfortunately, she didn’t seem to understand, and a few more correspondence took place during that year. I had forgotten about it until today, when it resurfaced. When I looked back across all the based mails, I realized it was kinda funny. So here it is.