Maya, Mel, QT and You - Interfacing with the QT Designer

After a rather harrowing weekend I decided that I'd follow through on my promise of a Maya/Mel/QT tutorial, so here it is! So without further ado, here we go:

So today we're going to go through how to make a basic qt interface. What we're going to be creating is an interface that will do 4 things:

Get user input to name an object 
List all the user objects 
Use a combo box to create an object 
Rename an object from the list box 
The basic premise of this interface will be to make a UI for a user to make an object, with a specific name. It will also list all geometric objects in the scene so we can select and rename the objects.

What we need:

Well to continue with the tutorial to test it out, you'll need a working version of Maya 2011. You can download a trial version from Autodesk's website if you don't already have one. You'll also need the QT toolkit which you'll need to download from Nokia's website. Download the LGPL version, unless you really want to distribute your apps in some other way. (I personally love Open Source software, so that's why I distribute them under a license that is Open Source friendly.) You're also going to need a text editor of some sort. If you're using Windows, I would suggest Notepad++ with the Mel language definition file from CreativeCrash.com.

If you're using a Mac I would suggest either Text Wrangler, Carbon Emacs or if you're familiar with it, Vim. If you choose the latter of the three, I will assume that you are familiar with Vi or are willing to go through the learning process for it. While it has a learning curve, it is EXTREMELY powerful. Emacs is just as powerful as Vi, and I do NOT wish to start that war on here.

Creating Custom Locator with Maya's Python API (English Translation)

This post is a english translation of this post. I'd wrote it after post this on CGTalk. Great thanks to Daisy C. Lyle. She translate all the french version to english and make a great work! She save me hours doing this! . Hope that this tutorial will be usefull.

As I mentioned before, I’m starting to use the Maya API Python binding. So I had a look at Rob Bateman’s sources (which I found incomprehensible a year ago) and “translated” them (not without difficulty) into Python…So I’ve created a little script with a custom locator. It’s obviously not the simplest thing in the world to begin with (I did have some grounding thanks to other tutorials, the Python “plug-ins” already incorporated into Maya and the OpenGL tutorials I’d done) but once the code is up and running, it’s quite fun to modify it to make your own locator…