A few months back I invested in a 3D printer, a Solidoodle 3 to be exact. A few reasons it came down to that model versus something like Makerbot are: Price, the Solidoodle 3 @ $799, was far more affordable than the $1999 price tag of the Makerbot Openness, all the parts for the solidoodle […]
Since I posted about iOS I figured why not share some info on android dev as well. To start off I will just say this, android dev is not as fun as advertised. I thought Apple was pretty annoying for all its hassle with the certificates and provisioning profile baloney but xCode and the coding […]
I’ve been fortunate enough to play with a LEAP Motion controller at work, If you are not familiar with this device, take a look here. It’s basically a few infrared lights and some smart hardware/software that tracks hand and finger/tool motions in a given field of view. After a quick calibration that involves waving your […]
I recently decided to take a stab at game development using ios, its something that was tossed around in my brain for a while before just before saying “Heck with it” and dove right in. I thought I would post what I invested to give anyone else out there considering doing the same an idea […]
My first iOS game is up in the app store as a free download here. This was a simple game created in cocos2D and objectiveC. This was mainly a test just to get through the whole process of getting an app together and submitting it and seeing how it was received by Apple and all […]
Ok, so you have some tools built and you have a basic understanding of Python and Maya but you want to start customizing things a bit more, maybe the ‘plastique’ style UI just isn’t as cool as it used to be and you want your tools to have a uniform or unique style to them. […]
Here are some useful python snippets I have found out on the interweb. I make no claim to them, use them! How to find a user’s appData folder on Windows:
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def _get_appdata_path(): """ get the users path to appdata folder """ import ctypes from ctypes import wintypes, windll CSIDL_APPDATA = 26 _SHGetFolderPath = windll.shell32.SHGetFolderPathW _SHGetFolderPath.argtypes = [wintypes.HWND, ctypes.c_int, wintypes.HANDLE, wintypes.DWORD, wintypes.LPCWSTR] path_buf = wintypes.create_unicode_buffer(wintypes.MAX_PATH) result = _SHGetFolderPath(0, CSIDL_APPDATA, 0, 0, path_buf) return path_buf.value |
How to find the dropBox path on a users computer:
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def getDropBoxPath(): """ find the dropbox path of the system running the script regardless of location """ from platform import system import base64 import os.path #check system and build path to dropbox host file _system = system() if _system in ('Windows', 'cli'): host_db_path = os.path.join(_get_appdata_path(), 'Dropbox', 'host.db') elif _system in ('Linux', 'Darwin'): host_db_path = os.path.expanduser('~', '/.dropbox', '/host.db') else: raise RuntimeError('Unknown system={}'.format(_system)) return None #see if path exists if not os.path.exists(host_db_path): print('NO DROPBOX INSTALLED == defaulting to c:/') return 'C:/' raise RuntimeError("Config path={0} doesn't exist".format(host_db_path)) #open and decode the host file to reveal the path with open(host_db_path, 'r') as f: data = f.read().split() return base64.b64decode(data[1]) |
As a follow up to the last post, for those of you who happen to be using PIL inside a Maya tool (running from within a mayapy execution) it will NOT work. Read the following post. I ran into the issue with one of my tools that was working fine in 2012 and when my […]
I ran into a bit of a snag when trying to install PIL (Python Image Library) on my 64-bit Win 7 machine. I got errors with the installer saying things like “No Python dir found for 2.6″, so then I found some links on stack overflow that said to try manually creating a registry file […]
This is a little silly, but I learned some more about customizing widgets in PyQt so there, justified but my wife still doesn’t get it. Use the widget however you like! click the link below to download! QtNyanProgressBar
So during week 3 it came down to finish up the base skinning and figuring out how I was going to tackle the corrective shapes and/or helper joints. My mentor showed me a video of some tools he uses that I found to be very useful so did my best to re-create them. While doing […]
I’m a week behind but that’s better than 2 weeks behind right? This weeks focus was on joint placement and initial skinning of my character. The character’s name is Frank and he is from a short film that a friend and I have been working on, he did the modeling and character design. Challenges Frank […]