[Maya] 3d paint script (as in geometry paint)

greuh

Hi all,

I thought I would pimp my script to the community, maybe some others would find it useful.
The story so far; after getting frustrated a lot trying to use geometryPaint, it seemed writing a new one was the easier way for me to get the work flow I was looking for.

Chance is if you don't feel oppressed by the way geometryPaint works (read the limitation/constraint with UVs and managing the grid), there's probably no point in trying this one instead.
However, if you are looking for a somewhat low-maintenance, straight point and shoot script to ray cast geometry, you might appreciate the difference over geometryPaint. If you are familiar with how AdvancedPainter (max script) works, you will definitely see the similarities.

Either way, here it is.

I haven't gone through intensive testing yet, but so far, it seems to work properly. It isn't anything really fancy, but it serves its purpose.
Please contact me if you find any bugs.

here's a screenshot:


hoping it is useful to some here

-g

spacemonkey

Great! I'll give this a whirl tomorrow

renderhjs

those are some giant buttons (looks like Wii style)

maybe add some distance slider so that one can hold down the pen or mouse and draw strokes of objects. The distance variable would then determine in world units at which point to add another geometry in a stroke.

MoP

Awesome! I was looking for something exactly like this, because like you say, the GeometryPaint stuff relies on UVs, it seems, and can end up producing really weird results.

I'll give it a try today.

greuh

yeah, I was caught in the giant fat windows 7 UI style whirlwind, sue me

I am planning to redo the whole thing whenever I get more than 2 weeks of python behind me and migrate the remaining MEL into a full python script.
For a while I wanted to do that distance threshold option, but as the script is laid out right now and how awkward it is to pass back and forth values between MEL and python, I went the timer way instead.

SHEPEIRO

ace

renderhjs

here is a nice inspiration,
its a script that does the same with some nice details I like:
http://www.evvisual.com/maxscript/script_planter.htm

quad

Sweet! I needed just this for a current project. The instance and random options are particularly cool (as geometry paint lacks them I think). Great work man :thumbup:


Edit: Oh, and btw if you want suggestions for more features a "flood" option would be useful I think, to get a fairly even distribution quickly.

frubes

for those Max nuts out there check out Neil Blevins object painter ui scripts. Its part of the Soulburn collection which is awesome. I use it pretty much every day at work to populate my digital environments.

http://www.neilblevins.com/soulburnscripts/soulburnscripts.htm#Soulburnscripts_for_3dsmax

MoP

Tried it today, works really well!

However the first time I installed it, I put it in "My Documents/maya/2008/", and it didn't detect the Python file properly. I suspect Maya's default pythonPath environment variable isn't set up right, since when I just put it in "My Documents/maya/" it all worked fine.

I did notice a while back that the default Maya python paths seem to be missing a / from the end of the strings so I think it never finds the correct path to search or something.

Toast

Bah, this script causes Maya 2011 to crash. Tested on different computers.

greuh are you still around here?

greuh

yeah, I got some reports about that.
unfortunately I am stuck with 2009 and work is not even planning a scheduled upgrade.

so at this time I have no way to reproduce it and debug it

Toast

No problem I understand. Unfortunately I cannot script at all...If I could I'd help out but the crash only happens as soon as you click when painting/placing an object.

MoP

greuh: The Maya 2011 trial is available from the Autodesk website now, you could install that at home?

CheeseOnToast

Very nice greuh. Can see a lot of different uses for this.

greuh

yeah, just saw the trial posted today. I guess I'll get that going. hopefully I'll find some time before the trial expires lol

greuh

Toast wrote: »

No problem I understand. Unfortunately I cannot script at all...If I could I'd help out but the crash only happens as soon as you click when painting/placing an object.

oh? well that actually still helps.
I thought for a while that was the semi-hack I did with how python stores variables I use to keep persistent data between session that would have been the cause of it. But that's executed before the UI is drawn.

But if it happens only where you describe it, it's probably just a simple issue with how context are handled with the new UI? hopefully?

onionhead_o

edit: NVM I thot this was texture painttin tool. i feel so stupid lol

Toast

Sorry to bump an old thread, but its totally not worth creating a new thread.

But greuh, this tool seems to slow down over time. I tried flushing Maya's undo queue (flushUndo), but to no avail.

I've found that when closing down Maya, then reopening and doing a bit of a paint it's fast again but then will gradually slow down again.

Since that happens it's not related to grouping or possibly even the DAG connections.

Is there anything we can do to minimize the slowdown (

Thanks!

bugo

Great tool, but yeah, I got the same issue. Although, I try not to do many strokes, and the ones u think they are good and if possible I combine them.