In Maya, many built-in commands support any of three modes: create, edit, and query. Although it may not be immediately obvious, each of these modes has some particularities that set them apart, and which consequently require some extra effort on the part of the programmer to support. Maya does have some built-in support, which is presently only partially functional, so it is helpful to understand what it actually gains you to use it and work around its issues.
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MSyntax.enableQuery() and MSyntax.enableEdit() Break Object Parsing
January 12th, 2010AM Tools 1.01
January 2nd, 2010I just uploaded version 1.01 of my AM Tools Python package today, which you can of course download from the Maya tools section. You can look through the files to see all of the changes that I made, but here are some of the major highlights.
- amInsertParents is now a Python command. I have therefore retired the old MEL version.
- Added API Debug Mode to menu. Enabling this mode overrides some Maya Python API classes for debugging. For this release, this mode overrides the __str__() functionality of MMatrix and MVector.
- Substantially improved a number of utility functions for validating input.
- Added validation for custom plug-ins.
- Fixed some language-related bugs that existed for Maya 8.5.
As always, please let me know if you have any problems or other feedback!
Problems with allNodeTypes Command
December 31st, 2009Oftentimes, when loading your own custom tool set, you may want to confirm the existence of a plug-in on the client machine in order to prevent weird errors. Specifically, if you create a tool that works with a custom node, you may want to verify the node’s existence using the allNodeTypes command. Unfortunately, this command has a really quirky problem when used in Python.
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Minor Site Update
December 17th, 2009I just migrated the whole site from http://6ixsetstudios.com to http://adammechtley.com! Sorry if you were trying to access anything during the short transition period. All incoming links should still work fine, but please let me know if you find anything broken anywhere in the site.
Problems with MItSelectionList Filters
December 14th, 2009One of the most common tools in the Maya API for custom commands is the MItSelectionList class. Part of the reason why it is so valuable is because it allows for an optional filter in its constructor using the MFn::Type enum. Applying a filter allows us to effectively ignore certain types of objects in which we are not interested, and conceivably to code with some amount of impunity since we know what the objects inside the iterator will be. Conceivably…
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