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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. So I decided to put together a build.

Just released my first online video tutorial, through cmiVFX

Python Introduction Vol 01 – Maya #

Amazing at Animation? Master of Modeling? Conquistador of Character Rigging?

But how is your Python?

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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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.