Book Image

Practical Maya Programming with Python

By : Robert Galanakis
Book Image

Practical Maya Programming with Python

By: Robert Galanakis

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Practical Maya Programming with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Introducing Qt, PyQt, and PySide


Let's start by going over some terminology and history to clear up the confusion surrounding the Maya user interface ecosystem.

There is a C++ framework called Qt. While the Qt user interface classes are the most widely known, Qt is actually an entire application framework. For this book, we'll limit ourselves to the user interface classes in the QtGui namespace, with occasional uses of the QtCore namespace which contains some base functionality.

By the way, Qt is officially pronounced cute, not cue-tee. However, I doubt anyone will call you out for using the latter, and it is how most people pronounce it anyway.

Maya began using Qt in the 2011 version. Before that, it was using a proprietary system for its UI. The change was mostly under the hood, and Maya's scripting interface for working with UI did not change. However, it did allow developers to create Qt extensions that are usable in Maya.

We are able to use Qt from Python by using bindings for C++ classes...