Python general questions

Coding
1

Hi there,
Just new here, so hello to everyone. I’m cg artist and develop some tools for our studio. We work in arch viz animations, with tools such as 3dsmax, nuke, photoshop, etc.
Actually, apart php/mysql, javascript, and some maxscript, I develop mainly in AutoIt language for a lot of small tools for our pipeline and production workflow, deloying updates .
I’ve wrote a few python scripts inside Nuke, but python is very new for me and I would get into it for our tools, being faster (execution speed), and a lot more open regarding UI and images handling (exr, png etc).

So, in our film industry, to write some standalone tools :

  • Which version of python do you install ? 2.6.5 like Nuke, or 2.7.3 ?
  • How do you do your UI for standalone tools ? PyQt (installing sip, PyQt etc ) ?
  • Which IDE do you use ?
  • Any must have packages ? To deal with file sequence, exr etc
  • Do you have one installation of python and modules on the network for everyone ? python on every machines (win7x64 here) ? Or compile to exe (py2exe ?) ?

I must say I’m a bit lost at recreating a complete dev environment and ecosystem lol !
Thanks dudes for any insight, really nice to have found this forum !

2

Hey there,

  • We use different versions for different tools. For standalone tools it does not really matter. For code that might be re-used it might be better to look for a common baseline
  • PySide sadly seems to be in a slow phase atm sadly. We try to go PySide wherever possible. Mainly due to licensing issues. For all things we actually sell we have to. For some internal tools (mainly based of the blur-python toolset for max) we have to go the PyQt road
  • Aptana (which is eclipse + PyDev, but comes with some extras like django support)
  • A LOT of packages out there. You might want to take a look at cortex-vfx on google code. We don’t use it, but it is a really neat package and can give a lot of inspiration
  • Python on every machine. Standalone tools are usually compiled to exe (esp. if bigger tools with many dependencies)

Regards,
Thorsten

3
  • We currently use Python 2.6.4 64-bit
  • For UI we use wxPython 2.9.1.1
  • Primarily Wing IDE Professional 4.9.1
  • Lots of must-have extensions. A few: pywin32, wxPython, SQLAlchemy, Twisted, numpy
  • One main install per project for standalone tools, another embedded interpreter inside our main tools program/framework. We only use py2exe for one startup script that runs before the standard Python install is present.
4

Thanks both, lot of information. I guess I will start with python 2.7 and pyqt and try some stuff.
Does anyone use eric4 IDE ? Seems good with pyqt ?
I will start with idle and Scite which I use exclusively with autoit. Let’s learn Python now, will come later for more vfx industry specific questions :cool:

Cheers