Description
This tutorial will walk you through creating a simple snake game in Maya using Python and Pyside, and creating object procedurally in the viewport.
Some of the content that you will be learning and real life applications:
1.- Generate widgets and Maya objects based on a coordinate.
There are so many scenarios where you will want to generate and place an object in a specific position. For instance, if you are creating your own World Space Baker, you will want to create a locator (or any object) in a specific point in space.
2.- Detect widget collisions using Python.
If you are developing your own Animation Picker and you want to do a “batch create buttons” from a bunch of selected items, you will want to check if there is a widget in certain space to make sure you don’t create a button on top of an already existing button.
3.- Timer events.
QTimers are very useful to make your script execute certain commands after some time has passed. For example, if you are working on a Render Manager, you may want to check if the image sequence that is being rendered already finished. To do this, you can use a QTimer to check every 1, 5…10 minutes, and if the image sequence exists, copy it to another location (backup) and run nuke to generate a .mov out of it. Then enable a button in your UI so that the animator can Preview this render.
4.- Keyboard Events
Keyboard events are a must if you want to enable your tool to use shortcuts. Every piece of software has them. Add Ctrl+S to save your picker, Ctrl+O to open it, check if Ctrl is pressed so you can show a different menu when right clicking… and the list goes on.
admin –
I absolutely love this course. This is one of those tutorial that teach you something fun that make you want to complete it instead of feeling burnt out. A lot of techniques in there such as QTimer, key events mapping is really useful in practical production environment.
Pros:
– Clear, concise and easy to follow tutorial if you are having a good basic understanding of PySide.
– Every chapter comes with an example .py file that you can compare and check with your script to see where you get it wrong.
– The tutorial walks you step by step with a clear goal of each chapter so you won’t feel overwhelming
– Many useful practical techniques with PySide that is rarely found from other sources.
– Who doesn’t want to build a game in Maya, that’s one of the most fun thing you can do in it :D.
Cons:
– As I mentioned in the pros above, this tutorial is for people who are already have basic understanding of PySide and object oriented programming. Many concepts are unexplained (although you can easily google them elsewhere). I actually love the current tutorial because of its “to the point” nature, however, I do understand that it might be a tad too advance for people who has limited experience in Python, especially object-oriented programming. Because of this, I can only giving it 4/5 despite excellent contents.
To summarize, if you’ve already comfortable with PySide and object-oriented programming and want to learn new techniques and concepts, I highly recommend this. However, if you are new to Python, I would recommend you learn PySide and object-oriented programming basic first before buying this to get the most out of it.
phungnhathuy