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.
Second video in the python for maya series, just released through cmiVFX!
If you watched the first video, you now have a good grasp on Python. Sweet. Let’s plow through some more involved concepts like python juggernauts!
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.
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.
AtomSplitter (chanToFbx) has been updated to v1.2, available through cmivfx.com
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:
