Practical Maya Programming with Python

Writing a character creator

So far, we've written the code to convert a hierarchy of transforms into joints. Now we must write something that we can hook up to a menu and a workflow. An overly simplified solution is to convert the current selection by assigning the following expression into a shelf button:

map(skeletonutils.convert_to_skeleton, pmc.selection())

But that's a pretty bad high-level function. What about error handling, user feedback, and the high-level decisions that we put off while writing the converter?

What we really want is something like the following:

charcreator.convert_hierarchies_main()

This can be hooked up to a menu button, which provides a better experience for the user and a place to make those decisions that we kept out ...