Time to start sharing what little tools and scripts I use in everyday life.
Here’s a multi-exporter I wrote for current project to speed up and stream-line animation exporting process, nothing fancy. It is used to export multiple animated game characters and objects. Responsive object selection list is probably the most fun thing, which inspired me to write another tool, which I will show in the next post.
Starting some new ‘sections’ of my blog. Under Random animation I will just post some little practice or personal or non-NDA animations I’m working on.
In order to support Qt 5 Maya 2017 now uses the PySide2 module and shiboken2. While this is supposed to bring a lot of improvements into Maya’s UI, including speed and new functions, it also breaks a lot of old scripts. Including my BroDynamics and other tools. I though about using Qt.py, but that would require me to include it with all my scripts, and really it was too complex for a lot of my tools, especially those shipped as one file.
At first I was a bit terrified, thinking that I’ll have to re-write a lot of code. But in fact I was able to adapt all of my scripts in few minutes.
So, the biggest changes in PySide2 are:
– Some widgets moved from QtGui to QtWidgets
– shiboken is also changed to shiboken2
Before the change I was using PySide like this:
from PySide import QtCore, QtGui
someWidget = QtGui.QWidget()
The biggest change is to switch to another method of importing PySide:
from PySide.QtCore import *
from PySide.QtGui import *
This way you import all modules directly, and instead of writing QtGui.QWidget you can just use QWidget. Obvious but very handy in this case.
Without any further speculation, here is my final PySide import code.
try:
from PySide2.QtGui import *
from PySide2.QtCore import *
from PySide2.QtWidgets import *
from shiboken2 import wrapInstance
print "Using PySide2"
except:
from PySide.QtGui import *
from PySide.QtCore import *
from shiboken import wrapInstance
print "Using PySide"
And then using simple Replace, available in any text editor, change all “QtGui.” and “QtCore.” to “”. Just remove them.
I will test BroDynamics and other scripts for some time, before making new versions available to the public. Stay tuned
Here are a few links you may find useful as well:
Maya Help – PyQt and PySide Widget Best Practices
http://ift.tt/2bLiajj
http://ift.tt/2bGkNFN
http://ift.tt/2bLiajx
Phew, it took me a while to get it all together. It was huge update. Last few days was I was fighting with bugs mostly, which started to appear seemingly out of nowhere.
There are three main updates in this release.
– Added 2 more simulation modes: Points and RBD
– UI Improved
Since there are these huge updates, there may be new bugs in this release, which I did not have a chance to catch yet. Feel free to report any problems you enouncter, and I will try to fix it ASAP.
Along with this release I made new promo video, and started making a series of How To videos.
I think later I will sit back and write a nice post about some behind-the-scenes… Or not… We’ll see
Changes:
1.4.0
– A lot of bug fixes and improvements overall.
– Compatibility fix! Now works with Maya 2014 too. Probably with 2013 as well.
– UI reworked, now windows delete properly when you close the main BroDynamics window, docked or undocked. Memory leak here and performance impact after closing and openning it often should be fixed now.
– Icons everywhere!
– NEW! Added single object simulation based on nParticles.
– NEW! Rigid Body and Ragdoll simulation module.
– Added SnapRuntime plugin for object matching for RBD mostly. Thank you, Red9.
– Fixed Get button in Batch Window
– Batch window’s list will now properly update when you hit Undo. Now no need to worry about making mistakes there at all.
A few weeks ago I was trying out some concepts in Unity, to practice C# and learn some new things. I think it’s time to show some of it here.
Everything in this prototype was done by me, including awesome capsule models for enemies and animations for player character.
Collision-based damage, imploding\exploding grenades, turret spawning, shooting, gravity gun and in later tests even multiplayer support.
Auto IK FK Switcher works with any rig using a regular 3-chain IK-FK setup. It works with meta-connections (fancy name for connecting nodes using ‘message’ connections and finding them later through these connections), which allows it to be context-sensitive. The UI has just a few buttons, and it knows which IK-FK body part you selected, and will perform a switch for selected body-part. You can also freely rename controls and objects, it will still work.
It also has an automatic mode, which will switch IK to FK if you select FK and vice-versa.
Control Mesh Creator replaces control curves with mesh-based controls. They follow the original mesh, and are invisible to the animator, who can simply click on the part of the mesh to select a control. Similar to Pixar’s Presto software approach.
