Python: Pipeline Tool Ideas

Pipelines
1

Hello,

I’m an aspiring Pipeline TD and am looking for some ideas for tools to create. I am familiar with Maya and would prefer the tool be for said package, however I wouldn’t mind learning something new. I would like to make something standalone in PyQt. Any ideas are welcome.

Thanks in advance

2

Write a script that exports vertex colors to a file and re-imports them. Everyone writes this script eventually anyway.

3

I’ve never really used vertex coloring to be quite honest, are you referring to vertex coloring for weights from a skin cluster or vert painting?

4

Any particular department/s you were thinking of tooling for?

5

You could write a script that exports any of those. The idea is to expose yourself to a variety of different areas within the API and general environment, not to really solve a particular need. Something like this touches on objects/nodes, components(vertices), file I/O, and probably UI.

6

Any department really, getting more experience with the modeling pipelines would be fun. I’ve recently worked on a threaded layer texture manager, where I used the threads for previewing large images (16 - 40 mb) and creating layered textures or individual file nodes and assigning them to misc channels (diffuse, tranparency, bump/normal, etc.). Before that I recreated the michael comet pose reader in python and a pose library that exports json files.

[QUOTE=btribble;24616]You could write a script that exports any of those. The idea is to expose yourself to a variety of different areas within the API and general environment, not to really solve a particular need. Something like this touches on objects/nodes, components(vertices), file I/O, and probably UI.[/QUOTE]

I’ll work on the vert color export script and see how far I can push it as well, I appreciate it.

More suggestions are always welcome as well.

7

I’d try something like this as an experiment.

  1. write an exporter to dump plain meshes out to disk in a human-readable text format
  2. write an importer that reads that in to max/maya
  3. Now go back and add UVs to the exporter, the exported file, and the importer
  4. Now add vert colors …
  5. Now add transforms…
  6. Now add animation…
  7. Now go back and look at the code you wrote for the first bit.
    What did you do right? What did you do wrong?
    What could you differently so that the next time all the changes
    did not cause so much work?
8

[QUOTE=Theodox;24619]I’d try something like this as an experiment.

  1. write an exporter to dump plain meshes out to disk in a human-readable text format
  2. write an importer that reads that in to max/maya
  3. Now go back and add UVs to the exporter, the exported file, and the importer
  4. Now add vert colors …
  5. Now add transforms…
  6. Now add animation…
  7. Now go back and look at the code you wrote for the first bit.
    What did you do right? What did you do wrong?
    What could you differently so that the next time all the changes
    did not cause so much work?[/QUOTE]

This seems like a pretty hefty idea and be an awesome challenge. Thanks a ton.

9

Well one thing I’m working on, is a error reporting module I can easily drop into existing tools, that logs all errors in a database on the server.

Once that is done, going to work on a django app, that takes all that information and displays it in a visual way.

10

passerby, are you using decorators for that? That makes it really easy (as a developer) to implement into tools with almost no overhead.

11

Im overriding the built in exception class.