How do you create UIs for character controls selection?

[hibigibees]

We can even do it through mel indirectly, I think the requirement is simple here - we just need to create a "text processing" which generates a code which makes a UI.

We can make the UI in html, flash, mel or even other languages too. what we need here is the code which can generated the html pages (or) passes info to a flash movie (or) a text document with links and commands which can be read by a mel script.

So, I guess this part was done using python, yap you can use external modules like pil ... to do the part. The coding part takes some time but the minute you code it, you can provide a user interface where the artist themselves can make their images by rendering the character and editing the image in photo application like photoshop...

The rnd part takes time, you need to find out about the character controls needed, userfriendliness level, options they might need like (select all, key all, mute all, select hi, select tgl or simply select replace...) - mostly its select replace or select. If your characters are similar like a team of football players or something, the 2d layout remains the same for all the characters in most cases... for shot specific controls you can provide a tab called additional controls and you can code it in a way that it checks a text file from a server location all the time.

So whenever riggers update character controls a python script will go through the charcters "nurbsCurve" visible attribute or a attr in specific or something and it will write a text file in server which will inturn send a message to you "like net send charXXUpdated" & you can run another python/mel script which will read the prior information and generate a code or text file which can be read by the main UI tabchange command function or something. So you get the choice of knowing what to update and when otherwise this thing can be directly channelized from the riggers or the tds to the animators...

moreover - learning python is simple if you get started, you can check out http://www.dpawson.co.uk/bop/byteofpython_120.pdf

[lucille]

hi--

I really think those bitmap ui's have limited utility--why?--you can't mutiselect.
i find curve based uis with a scriptjob much better. there are issues, but they
are resolvable --I think there is one on the web called zooTriggered that is
a good starting point--



paul

[CGTalk Moderation]

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.