In this section we'll create a PySide user interface for the character creator/hierarchy converter we worked on in Chapter 2, Writing Composable Code. The GUI will respond to the user changing selection, and when the user interacts with the GUI, it will update the Maya scene. This project will teach us the fundamental concepts that allow the decoupling of Maya and PySide components. This decoupling allows an ever-more-complex set of interactions while still keeping the code maintainable.
Our GUI will be a Python script like any other. Let's make a file hierarchyconvertergui.py in our development root C:\mayapybook\pylib. Open it up in your IDE and write:
from qtshim import QtGui, QtCore, Signal
This will import the two main PySide modules into your file, allowing you to use GUI classes (through QtGui) and core library classes (through QtCore), as well as the Signal class. Most of the time you will only use QtGui classes, but in this example...