On Apr 12, 3:13 am, "C. B. Esquire" <[email protected]> wrote: > Just a generic question, this goes for modeling, texturing, lighting, > animation, rigging, dynamics, sims, all of it ~ > > If you want to go into detail, great, if not just a quick answer is fine. > What are some of the built-in, and 3rd party python modules you are using > and for Maya tasks? > > PyQt for gui development as an example.'
ctypes is essential. You might want to write a plugin in Python, and find that the cost of converting data from C++ to Python and vice- versa is acceptable (it isn't, always,) but the algorithm you want to use is very expensive in CPython. ctypes lets you write bits of that algorithm in C and easily call the C from Python. Even when you can't afford CPython's ridiculously bad GC you can prototype in Python and then replace the Python bit-by-bit with highly optimized C using ctypes. At the end you will wind up with something slightly (read insignificantly) faster than C-like C++ (no vtables,) but more importantly you will have been able to test your algorithms in Python, and keep them working at every step when translating them to C. This is an extraordinarily valuable technique for plugin writers. T Tagore Smith -- http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya
