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Practical Maya Programming with Python

You're reading from   Practical Maya Programming with Python Unleash the power of Python in Maya and unlock your creativity

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Product type Paperback
Published in Jul 2014
Publisher
ISBN-13 9781849694728
Length 352 pages
Edition 1st Edition
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Author (1):
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Robert Galanakis Robert Galanakis
Author Profile Icon Robert Galanakis
Robert Galanakis
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Table of Contents (12) Chapters Close

Preface 1. Introspecting Maya, Python, and PyMEL FREE CHAPTER 2. Writing Composable Code 3. Dealing with Errors 4. Leveraging Context Managers and Decorators in Maya 5. Building Graphical User Interfaces for Maya 6. Automating Maya from the Outside 7. Taming the Maya API 8. Unleashing the Maya API through Python 9. Becoming a Part of the Python Community A. Python Best Practices Index

Creating the denormalized_skin context manager


In this and proceeding sections, we'll build a context manager that will temporarily denormalize a skin cluster.

Most skin clusters are normalized and support a limited number of influences. A skin is normalized when the sum of all influence weights equals 1.0 for each vertex. This ensures the skin deforms in a predictable way. Limiting the number of vertex influences is generally useful when doing things like painting skin weights. It can also be a technical constraint (for example in the case of many video games), or a useful way to simplify the skinning process (you don't need to worry about culling low influences repeatedly).

Even though normalized skin and limited influences are useful for interactive work, they can be a pain for scripting. Sometimes we want to set the values of influences explicitly, and normalize and cull influences at the end. We will build a context manager to facilitate this.

The lessons here can be applied to wherever...

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