•February 5, 2014 •
3 Comments
I know I shouldn’t technically be promoting “competition,” but hey, it’s my web site, right? I’ll do whatever pleases me! And it pleases me to bring your attention to things I think could be helpful.
I just noticed that Rob Galanakis has a new book coming out, Practical Maya Programming with Python. Not only is Rob a thoughtful and experienced software engineer, but it looks like the book should cover some great topics that we didn’t really get into in ours for various reasons—PyMEL, PySide/Qt, and aspects of software architecture and design. It’s definitely something worth keeping an eye on!
Posted in Maya, Python
•September 24, 2013 •
6 Comments
As of today, version 3.0 of my Python IDE of choice, PyCharm, is available! Of interest to Maya developers, they’ve added built-in support for seamlessly setting up Maya’s interpreters. (Previously, on Windows, you had to do some workarounds with symlinks, and on Mac it was simply not possible, to my knowledge). Also interesting to plenty of newcomers out there is that they now have a completely free version, PyCharm CE. If you’re still using Wing or Eclipse/Aptana, it’s definitely worth giving it a whirl.
Posted in Python
•July 16, 2012 •
1 Comment
Have you mastered all of the content in the book? Are you looking for new challenges? Chad Vernon has recently released some videos on CGCircuit that you may find useful, including one on applied 3D math, one on the Maya C++ API, and one on creating a custom jiggle deformer. I haven’t watched any of them myself, but Chad is a hero, so I have no doubt they’re great.
Posted in API, Maya, Uncategorized
•March 19, 2012 •
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GDC has passed and I’ve started to recover from the workload that was awaiting me upon my return, so I thought I’d toss up a few points that came up. A lot of stuff I talked about was related to topics that can be found in the book, but I thought I’d share a few notes on other stuff. Please feel free to ask questions or to disagree in the comments for this post!
Continue reading ‘Post-GDC Wrap-Up’
Posted in API, Maya, Python
•March 19, 2012 •
10 Comments
We’ve received notification that the indentation problems on the Kindle version should now be fixed, which seems to be reflected in the Kindle preview on Amazon. Please feel free to share your experiences reading the Kindle version with us.
Posted in Uncategorized
•February 3, 2012 •
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It has been brought to our attention that the Kindle version of the book currently has some serious formatting problems. Namely, some customers have told us that leading white space is stripped out, which of course renders the code samples uninterpretable.
Although we (as authors) have little ability to do anything about it ourselves, we have passed this info up the food chain in hopes that it can be resolved. In the meantime, if you have the option, we’d recommend avoiding the Kindle version of the book until or unless it can be resolved. Thanks to those of you who let us know! We’ll be sure to post an update if we find out anything different.
Posted in Uncategorized
•January 27, 2012 •
3 Comments
I’ve been going over a bunch of old code lately and picking out some awful habits of mine. Today I want to talk about one that unfortunately is also prevalent throughout the 1st edition of book: sloppy exception handling.
Continue reading ‘Sloppy Exception Handling’
Posted in API, Chapters, Python
•January 8, 2012 •
3 Comments
Thanks to everyone who has picked up the book and has given us feedback so far! I wanted to post up a quick note that three of us will be doing Maya/Python-related poster sessions at GDC 2012.
Hope to see you there!
Posted in Maya, Python
•September 10, 2011 •
12 Comments
Obtaining and installing everything needed for PyQt can be quite a task! Moreover, Maya 2012 requires some different steps to make sure you have all of the proper files needed to get going with PyQt. The information provided here should help you locate everything you need to download to be ready to build and install PyQt on your particular operating system, whether it is Windows, OS X, or Linux.
Continue reading ‘Building and Installing PyQt’
Posted in API, Chapters, Maya, Python
•August 12, 2011 •
2 Comments
Welcome to the website for our book, Maya Python for Games and Film! We’re really happy to have the project finished, and we’re glad that you’ve either picked up the book or stopped by to check out the web site. We really just want the book and site to be helpful tools for people who are learning all about Python in Maya, so we hope you find it useful! We make no claims that we are the most expert developers where these topics are concerned: we were only ambitious enough to try to write a book to help newcomers to the community.
That being said, writing a book is hard, and writing a book about Python is a lot more difficult than we had anticipated! As such, we want to thank our contributing authors, Seth Gibson and Kristine Middlemiss, as well as our technical editor, Dean Edmonds, without whom this project would not have been possible.
We also want to be the first to admit that our book is not perfect. We have striven to be incredibly attentive to detail, but we’re sure there are problems or inconsistencies in our text or code examples. (You can find errata for each chapter noted on the chapter pages.) We’re also sure that, with as talented and populous as the Python community is, there will be plenty of people who disagree with some of our decisions or coding style. (Please make the time to read the Introduction chapter, as our printed code samples ended up a little unconventional to fit with the restrictions of the medium.)
Have fun and good luck on your journey to master Python in Maya!
Posted in Chapters, Python
Tags: code, Python
