sjt » Scripting

doughellmann.com – a fantastic python resource

sjt — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 21:06:29 +0000

I ran into Doug Hellmann’s site the other day doughellmann.com. And he an excellent collection of articles and examples for a bunch of modules from python’s standard library called Python Module of the Week. The one’s I’ve used and had no idea existed were configparser, optparser and the logging module. But there are many, many more there.

Absolute gold for those of us who havent gone through every page of the documentation.

Maya scripts

sjt — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 00:39:58 +0000

While I was making friends? I wrote some useful maya scripts that did all sorts of tedious things (like creating 100 bend deformers and controlling them with one control and a dash of randomness). I’ve decided to put some of those scripts online and you can find them on the new Maya scripts page ( there only two there right now ).

Some of those scripts are written in Python, some in Mel, although I do like Python way more then Mel (somehow using backticks as an integral part of a programming language doesn’t strike me as a good idea).

sjtNotes v1

sjt — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 02:43:51 +0000

Well, it’s been pretty quiet around here for the last couple of weeks (months?) but now something happens; a new mel script.

sjtNotes is a supersimple script that simply allows you to have some notes inside your scene that are saved along with your scene file. The script is ridiculously simple and opens this window:

Then you type your notes and hit “Save & close” and then run the script again and edit those notes and again save and close. You get the drift …

Anyway, here’s the link to this awesome script:

sjtNotes v1

If there is anything wrong with this script or you actually can use this then please let me know.

In other news I’m just busy working on my demo reel at VFS mostly spending my time rigging and learning stuff about maya that I didn’t know, like the deformation order, which I like a lot and has saved my ass on one occasion. Oh, and I’m dabbling with RenderMan, it. is. awesome. (so far at least).

Match translation “tool” for Maya

sjt — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 03:15:55 +0000

For those who have used XSI for anything have most likely encountered the very useful “Match translation” tool (and it’s variants). This tool exists in Maya but according to some it doesn’t work very well especially when within a hierarchy. So a solution was to constrain the object you want to move to the object that we want to match the translation to and then, in the outliner, delete the constraint.

This obviously is very tedious especially if you want to this many times. So I decided to try creating my first mel scripts and created a set of scripts in a custom shelf that do this automatically. Here is the “Match translation” script:

string $nodes[]; $nodes = `selectedNodes`; pointConstraint -name tmpconstraint -offset 0 0 0 -weight 1; select -r tmpconstraint; delete; select $nodes[size($nodes)-1];

This script simply automates the steps listed above and the other variants (translation+orientation, orientation, scale) all work in almost the same way.

These scripts work like this: you first pick the object that you want to match the translation to and second select the object you want to move and then hit one of the shelf buttons. Simple right?

I like to use these script as marking menus and on that note I was thinking about creating a tutorial that shows how to add custom marking menus, since I guess that some people simply don’t know how to do that (but many of you do). That tutorial will hopefully be up soon.

Anyway, you can find the script here and to install it you simply place it in

/Users//Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/8.5/prefs/shelves (on a mac)

and I can’t remember where to place it on other platforms.

After Effects ScriptUI

sjt — Wed, 20 Jun 2007 14:10:41 +0000

A few weeks ago I was looking through Jeff Almasol’s site redefinery.com (whose rd_ScriptLauncher script is awesome) and I wanted to create a script that utilizes a UI like his scripts do. I started looking through the AE scripting documentation and only found ScriptUI mentioned in the introduction.

After a bit of digging I found that the Bridge javascript reference (pdf) has a ScriptUI reference section. Not everything in there works with AE but most of it does. So now nothing should stop me from scripting awesomeness.