Saturday, April 3, 2010

Frame Checker 2.0

This is the first of my Maya independent python scripts. After authoring a few tools that would really be best suited for use independent of Maya I learned Qt and used py2exe to create a standalone version of the frame checker. I had originally written Frame Checker in python anyway, so I literally just recreated the ui in Qt Designer and then setup the signal connections. Using Qt for the first time, I found that signals and slots are a lot like events and listeners in as3, so it was a piece of cake to get used to, not that Qt is really tough to wrap your brain around in the first place. PyQt4 and Qt Designer were really awesome to use, and I'm sure this won't be the last of the tools that I port to Maya-independent-land.

You may notice that the GUI now looks Nuke/Maya 2011-esque and that's because I went with the 'plastique' style. I like dark colors, as you probably can tell, and the other available styles didn't seem to handle the dark colors as well. Another added bonus is that the .ui files that I created with designer will be ready for use in Maya 2011, can't wait for that 8).

Still gotta get together a unified location for tool docs, but I'll get to that later. Expect the batch file generator some time in the near future though... For now you can grab the new frame checker at www.bohdon.com/scripts
To use it just unzip somewhere and run the exe.