Call me old fashioned, but I do like Maya's UI for most in-app tools.
However, I've hit against its limitations far too often (mostly in
trying to build responsive UI's for my rigging tools--it seems like more
and more of the command connections just aren't ported to python, and
trying to encode MEL commands in breaks my object-oriented systems. So,
I've made the leap to PyQt. So far I'm loving it, although I've had my
issues understanding the systems (Several previous posts should document
this). The question I have is partially practical, partially
philosophical, but I'd love some feedback from the community. The odds
are good I'm too deeply immersed in Maya's way of handling UI to see
something obvious, so hopefully it's something easy.
I've got a ton of work done on my Master's thesis in Maya's UI, and PyQt
doesn't have a lot of the built-in layouts (by maya's terminology--most
of them are just widgets in PyQt) I've grown to love for my tools. I
posted earlier about my attempts to recreate the frameLayout, and
although I've mostly replicated it (which was great for learning some of
the internals), I feel like I might be taking the overall wrong
approach--I am on a timeline for my current project (my Master's
Thesis), and the crunch is starting to catch up to me. I've figured out
how to build frameLayouts and so forth using Maya's tools, and then
connect them into a PyQt build--that part was easy, thanks to Justin's
videos and Nathan Horne's blog. What I'm struggling with on that end is
what to do from there. Do I have access to the old command slots
through PyQt now? If so, is there a reference somewhere that I've
missed in my google searches?
So far, here's what I've done in my latest experiments (using the
aforementioned FrameLayout):
from PyQt4 import QtCore, QtGui
import sip
import maya.OpenMayaUI as mui
import maya.cmds as cmds
def getMainWindow():
ptr = mui.MQtUtil.mainWindow()
mainWin = sip.wrapinstance(long(ptr), QtCore.QObject)
return mainWin
win = QtGui.QWidget(parent=getMainWindow())
win.setWindowFlags(QtCore.Qt.Tool)
fl = cmds.frameLayout(label="Joe's FrameLayout", width=300, height=500,
collapsable=True)
ptr = mui.MQtUtil.findControl(fl)
frame = sip.wrapinstance(long(ptr), QtCore.QObject)
frame.setParent(win)
win.show()
win.raise_()
Like I said, nothing particularly special. But, it gives me a
functional frameLayout Widget. However, I'm not sure how to dig into
that widget once I have it and access its slots, or the slots of its
child controls, or to access their values. I imagine I can query it's
children to get the subwidgets, so that part shouldn't be too much
trouble. I did link this into my wing instance so I could look at it in
the debugger, but again that's like finding a needle in a haystack since
I don't know exactly what I'm looking for, and it's mostly showing up as
just internal functions. Any advice on this--using reflection or any
other tools available would help.
So, the question is this. If there are ways to hook in to the tools
from Maya on this, what are they? A point in the right direction is
mostly what I need--I'm pretty good at figuring things out once I've got
that. If not, am I better off just building the mayaUI components from
maya (with the command connections) and then connecting the master
layout into my PyQt setup? Or should I spend the time and completely
rebuild the elements I want (form and framelayout mostly, although I do
also prefer Maya's column and row layouts over Q{V,H}BoxLayouts)
natively in PyQt?
Also, as a fair option, am I going down the wrong road entirely here,
and should I just try to rethink my UI from the ground up to utilize
just the layouts that Qt provides? I know that as I get more
comfortable in Qt I'll probably want to think more on those lines, but
I'm still struggling with the switch.
Again, if you've taken the time to read this far, Thank You! Any
thoughts you have would be most appreciated.
Thanks,
Joe
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