Maya Rig Builder

A few years ago I stumbled across a paper by Bungie detailing their metaData structure they used to track complex data in Maya and build better tools.  At the time at Eurocom we were struggling with the shear amount of data we had started to produce with next gen content.  Rigs had become more complex, we were doing 4 projects each with different character requirements.  Cartoon style rigs, biped, quadruped and monster style dead space rigs.  All our tools had to work with these variants.  The paper seemed like the answer to our problems.

So I wrote a metaData API at home and brought it into Eurocom and tried to hook it into our rig builder code.  At the time we were transitioning to python from MEL and we had bit's of code all over the place.  The metaData API enabled us to bring OO design to the rig.  It was a pain to retrospectively hack into the MEL calls, but it was worth it.  It's been a few years now.  The rig is still MEL with callbacks that fill the metaData structures and set the metaData properties.  Some of it is python, it's evolving every day and new modules are really seeing the benefit.

The concept is now in a lot of our tools outside of Rigs.  The environment asset pipeline is carrying metaData, which in turn is getting output via our internal tools and making it into the engine.  It's a pretty sweet system and is a lot like Maya's assemblies feature that came in 2013.5.

I've been digging around in my laptop and found an old UI mock up for my Rig Builder I use at home.  It's based on my metaData API that I've evolved separately.  Perhaps one day I'll be able to release these tools.

Getting PyCharm to play nice with mayapy.exe

I've started to get frustrated with wing IDE as it's laking features of late. Eclispe is very good but it's very hard to get into and setup remote debugging. So enter PyCharm. It's actively being developed and has come a long way in a very short period of time.

The 1st thing you will notice is that you can't add mayapy as the interpreter. You have 2 options on windows. If your on Vista or Win 7 the you can add a symbolic file link to mayapy in the bin folder. If your on XP then you can try this .cmd hack to fool PyCharm.

The .cmd trick
Add a file in the maya bin dir called python.cmd

inside the file add the following lines of code

@echo off
mayapy.exe %*

In PyCharm add this python.cmd as the interpreter. This should do the trick. But I have had this fail on occasions.

python.exe sybolic link
open up the cmd console in Vista/Win7. Alter this line to your maya bin dir

cd "C:\Program Files (x86)\Autodesk\Maya2012\bin"

then type

mklink python.exe mayapy.exe

you should have what looks like a shortcut named python.exe in the bin directory. Now in PyCharm you can add this as your python interpreter.

This in my opinion is a bug, after all wings and eclipse don't require this step! but for now, it's all we have.