I recently started documenting technical issues that I encounter or things that I learn during my Maya scripting projects, and decided to share the notes with the public. I hope others will find it useful when troubleshooting. Click here to see the docs.
https://gist.github.com/1223185
This script finds a vector from a curve. I needed it for orienting a follice to the same direction as the curve’s base, which corresponds to the first two cvs. After writing it, I realized that using edit points (ep) or curve points (u) would give a more accurate direction. Good enough for now, but will rewrite it.
UPDATE: Turns out that I could just use the pymel function tangent to accomplish the same thing (i.e. finding the tangent at a given point on a curve). For example, to find the tangent at parameter 0, which is the start of the curve, execute curv.tangent(0)
I got hooked on my last script (see previous post) and decided to extend it by creating a hair system out of the particle paths. I’ll post the script when it’s working more smoothly, but here are a couple screencaps.
Just learned about Github embedding with Gist. To celebrate the excitement, here are small pymel snippets you may find useful!
Here’s a Python snippet that selects vertices sharing only two edges (using maya.cmds as mc):
With the mesh object selected,
obj = mc.ls(sl=True)[0]
vertCount = mc.polyEvaluate(obj, v=True)
vertList = ['{0}.vtx[{1}]'.format(obj,vert) for vert in range(vertCount) if len(mc.polyInfo('{0}.vtx[{1}]'.format(obj,vert), ve=1)[0].split(':')[1].split()) == 2]
mc.select(vertList)
The if statement containing the polyInfo command does the filtering by counting the number of edges around the queried vertex. Unfortunately this returns a line of values in a string, so I had to split it a couple times to retrieve the edges count. For example, vertex 302 of ‘polySurface’ is shared by the edges 506, 489, 484, and 485:
mc.polyInfo('polySurface.vtx[302]', ve=1)[0]
# Result: u'VERTEX 302: 506 489 484 485 n' #
UPDATE: A vertex sharing two edges is called ‘winged’. Here’s another way to select winged vertices using PyMEL (as pm)…
obj = pm.ls(sl=True)[0]
vertList = [obj.verts[v] for v in range(len(obj.verts)) if len(obj.verts[v].connectedEdges()) == 2]
pm.select(vertList)
