I just released a minor update to AM Tools that I thought was worth mentioning here. The only change is some refactoring in plug-in verification to ensure everything will work fine with versions of Maya older than 2010 on Windows. Previously, I was using the allNodeTypes command to verify the existence of plug-ins containing nodes. While this command generally only needs to be called twice to make it work in old versions of Maya on OSX (and I believe Linux too), Windows users could get a Debug.dll error that would just prevent the script from working. Special thanks to Sean Binder and Chad Dombrova for helping me troubleshoot this!
Posts Tagged ‘Maya’
AM Tools 1.04
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010AM Tools 1.03
Friday, February 19th, 2010I just uploaded an update to my AM Tools package, which contains some new goodies. In addition to including the AM_Ribbon plug-in that I previewed previously, I have also included an AM_ExposeTransform node, which I will be discussing in an upcoming Autodesk MasterClass that I am doing with Ryan. This node, much like its counterpart in 3D Studio Max, outputs transformation data for an object with respect to another object. In addition to basics like translation, rotation, and distance, the node also allows you to compute the angle between arbitrary axes on the objects as well as an angle from the exposed object’s arbitrary axis to the reference object’s position. Take a look in the example file to get some ideas of how you might use it. Special thanks to my friend, Sean Binder of Raven Software, for providing me with the torso model.
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New Plug-in Coming Soon: AM_Ribbon
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010Things have been unusually hectic so far this year, and with GDC on the horizon it’s not looking to be much clearer for awhile. However, that doesn’t mean I haven’t found a way to make all of my different obligations overlap in some ways! I’ve been working a little bit as a consultant over the last few months to help out Infinite Ammo with an upcoming title: Marian.
During the course of my work on the project, I developed a new Python plug-in for Maya to help out with hair modeling. I will hopefully have a chance to deploy a new version of my free Python package soon that will include it, but in the meantime I thought I might share this video that Alec posted up on the IA website where I show what the plug-in does. Hopefully some other folks out there will find it useful too!
MSyntax.enableQuery() and MSyntax.enableEdit() Break Object Parsing
Tuesday, January 12th, 2010In 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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AM Tools 1.01
Saturday, 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!