What the man behind the curtain is up to.

As a budding tech artist myself, having considered myself a full time artist and animator up until a couple years ago when I picked up programming and writing my own tools, This has made a profound impact on me just to see and hear people doing what I do everyday. It’s just as good, if not better than being there to talk to them in person.

Really big thanks to the person who put this together. It really solidifies the meaning of an integral part of the industry that is a bit esoteric to most people. Just ask anyone what a tech artist or technical director is and listen to the varying responses you get, even from seasoned veterans.

What I’ve come to understand is that people that have been in the industry since beta Maya and Max and SGI is that they were riggers and other artists by trade and just as the scope of technology broadened had to naturally be good technical problem solvers. Now, the breadth of gaming technology and workflows is getting so vast and evolving so rapidly that Tech Artists are very valuable especially to smaller companies that can’t afford to hire specialized teams.

Hence, I naturally flowed into becoming a Tech Artist myself the past few years after working at a smaller company for so long and getting tired of working with the software and it’s limited capabilities but vast potential to optimize workflow and make art on computer fun!

If you are a similar artist starting to make your own tools in mel and python for “DCC” then put your eyes and ears on what these people have to say.  It may be one of the only times you get to hear all of these people that work behind the scenes in the public forum all at once!  But thanks to the wide variety of forums on the internet you can communicate and learn with them and join the ever growing Tech Artist collective.

 

Use windows clipboard data in your Maya Python scripts or other generic python.

Dependencies:
setuptools – You should have setuptools installed.
pip – If you have setuptools and/or use easy_install switch to pip by using easy_install to download and install pip, you won’t be sorry.  Pip is awesome, setuptools sux.
pyWin32 – Use pip to download pyWin32 from the commandline using pip install pyWin32.  Copy the installation to your Maya site-packages folder including any .pth, .txt, or .egg-info files.  Tip:  open .pth files in a text editor of choice and check out where pip’s libs are.

'''
based on mel script found here: http://bit.ly/e4qdyH
'''
import win32clipboard

def getClipboardData():
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 d = win32clipboard.GetClipboardData( win32clipboard.CF_TEXT )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
 return d
getClipboardData()

def putClipboardData(text):
 win32clipboard.OpenClipboard()
 win32clipboard.EmptyClipboard()
 win32clipboard.SetClipboardText( text )
 win32clipboard.CloseClipboard()
t= 'test text'
putClipboardData(t)

This is based on what I found on teacup’s techy art stuff, written a while ago. I though it deserved an update, plus I needed it for something specific. It is a really handy module to have in your repertoire.  I posted these in a hurry so you probably need to add in some checks to make sure the datatype you are trying to retrieve is text only or else you’ll get errors.

PyQt and Qt obviously are way more powerful for getting other types of data including pixmap and slew of others.  This is simplified for a specific purpose.  Maybe soon I will be able to post a Qt version including drag and drop functionality.

 

Here’s a script I wrote for adding sub-directories of paths I’ve already added to the sys.path in my userSetup.py.

I’m just starting to code seriously in python and it seems like just getting everything to work right in Maya without a lot of fuss is pretty daunting for a beginner with little outside help except for the internet and a couple books.

As my Script Repo develops over time, I don’t want to have to keep worrying about PYTHONPATH having everything in it so I tell it where the root directories are and this script does the rest.

Hope somebody finds this helpful!

import sys
from os import walk
path = ja_python_paths
for p in path:
 for root, dirs, files in walk(p):
 if p is not root:
 sys.path.append(root)

#You can add an optional print statement at the end
#to see what it's doing...

if p is not root:
 print 'adding', root, 'to sys.path'
 sys.path.append(root)

 

Lately, I’ve been working on learning how to develop PyQt UI tools with Maya. Since I work with Maya 2009 daily, I have had to do quite a lot of digging to find out how things were implemented smoothly for it to work with that version. Hopefully, this makes it easier to understand and appreciate it in 2011 and *gasp* :-O 2012, where PyQt is fully integrated! Anyway, if you are in the same predicament, then I should be able to help, send comments and emails my way.