So this might be old news to you folk out there, but I use an IDE (Integrated Development Environment) to edit my code. And Eclipse is too much of a behemoth to behold, and thus enter pyCharm Community Edition. I have been using this awesome software for about 6 months now as recommended by a colleague of mine. 

Working as a freelancer, I use different platforms to update my own personal code, so versioning would be a very handy tool, which pyCharm has its own version control system (VCS) in p...
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This is by now a bit of old news. But I am going to spend more time on this blog updating and releasing more of my code onto the interwebs. So here it is. Autodesk Maya has released a new python friendly API since their Maya 2013 release where you can easily access by importing their module 

 

import maya.api.OpenMaya as api

To this effect, they claim that using their python api is virtually 2 to 3 times faster than using their old api version. Remember that the original API is a python wr...
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Instead of explicitly coding all your , lets say your icon paths, you can query Maya to return the location of your preferences pathname during startup. This way you can set your own custom path that can be picked up from multiple users during maya startup.

global proc shelf_soup(){
  string $appver= `about -preferences`; 
  string $soupIcon= ($appver + "/prefs/icons/soup/");
	//Or wherever the shelf location might be
	//Other useful commands are `getenv "MAYA_APP_DIR"`
	shelfButton
		-enabl...

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