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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

Working with menus


Working effectively with Maya's menu system involves marrying Maya UI commands with PySide to get the best of both worlds. Maya's menus are an abstraction of standard Qt widgets, and we should use that same abstraction, through UI commands, rather than creating our own. However, we may still want to work with the controls in more sophisticated ways than Maya allows, requiring us access to the actual Qt object.

For the next few sections, we'll create a way to highlight menu items as new until the first time they are clicked.

Creating a top-level menu

Maya's UI commands work just like its other commands. A UI object is represented by a pipe-delimited hierarchical path, such as 'MayaWindow|DemoMenu|menuItem254'. When we use a command to create a UI object, such as a menu, we need to know the path to its parent.

In the case of creating an entry on Maya's menu bar alongside File, Edit, and Help, we need to know the path to the main Maya window. We can do this through the following...

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