Blogs

AtomSplitter has been updated to v1.6, available through cmivfx.com

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. This is a result of the curves having been hand drawn originally in the art department, and they posed issues during rendering after being planar-ized.

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

AtomSplitter has been updated to v1.5, available through cmivfx.com

AtomSplitter (chanToFbx) has been updated to v1.2, available through cmivfx.com

“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.

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.

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. I figured there had to be a simple way of just overloading the method on the normal object when I create an instance. Fortunately python considers everything objects and pretty much anything can be changed. So I did this:

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.

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.