Getting the Renderer options for the current pass is just a one-liner:
Application.GetValue( "Passes.Current.RendererOptions" )
Saturday snippet – Getting the Renderer options for the current pass
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Category Archives: Python
Beneath the hood: why ApplyOp doesn’t pop up a PPG
Let’s take a look at a question that was posted recently on the Softimage mailing list:
From: softimage-bounces@listproc.autodesk.com [mailto:softimage-bounces@listproc.autodesk.com] On Behalf Of Adam Sale
Sent: Tuesday, January 08, 2013 3:40 PM
To: softimage@listproc.autodesk.com
Subject: Force ppg to open on script launchI’m a little confused as to why the following does not work:
– Get a sphere
– Run Deform > Smooth
– PPG appears and all is good.Now, take the generated command and run it through the script editor
ApplyOp(“Smooth”, “torus”, 3, siPersistentOperation, null, 0);
This time, no PPG appears.
Any idea why? And is there a way to force a ppg launch when I tun the command from a button or from the script editor?
Thanks 🙂
Adam
Matt Lind explained why on the list, but I’ll take a little more detailed look into how commands like Smooth work.
Deforms like Smooth (and Relax and Push and Bend and others) are commands that are mapped to a special handler function in $XSI_HOME\Application\DSScripts\operators.vbs.
The ApplyOpProc provides special-case handling for applying operators, and also takes care of popping up a PPG after the operator is applied.
Don’t try to run “Smooth”; you’ll just get an error. It’s scripting name is actually ApplyOp.
ApplyOp is also implemented by a VBScript handler in operator.vbs. This time, it’s ApplyOpFunc, and ApplyOpFunc does not inspect the created operators.
If you want to apply a Smooth operator from your script, and pop up the PPG after, here’s one way to do it:
si = Application
si.AutoInspect( si.ApplyOp("Smooth", si.Selection, 3, "siPersistentOperation", "", 0) )
Saturday snippet – Launching a command-line utility and viewing its output
Here’s a snippet that shows how to launch a command-line program in a command prompt window, and keep the command prompt window open so you can see the output. Note that does not block Softimage.
#sKick = "C:/Users/SOLIDANGLE/Documents/Workgroups/sitoa-2.5.0-2013/Addons/SItoA/Application/bin/nt-x86-64/kick.exe"
sKick = XSIUtils.BuildPath( Application.InstallationPath( 2 ), "Addons", "SItoA", "Application", "bin", XSIUtils.Environment("XSI_CPU_OPT"), "kick.exe" )
XSIUtils.LaunchProcess( "cmd /C start cmd /K %s -licensecheck" % sKick )
Basically, what this does is launch a cmd.exe process, and in that process, run the command “start cmd /K kick -licensecheck”. The second “cmd” is required to open a command prompt, where you’ll see the output of “kick -licensecheck”.
In JScript, it would be something similar:
sKick = XSIUtils.BuildPath( Application.InstallationPath( 2 ), "Addons", "SItoA", "Application", "bin", XSIUtils.Environment("XSI_CPU_OPT"), "kick.exe" )
XSIUtils.LaunchProcess( "cmd /C start cmd /K " + sKick + " -licensecheck" )
In Python, you could also do this:
from subprocess import call call(["cmd", "/K", sKick, "-licensecheck"])
The above would open a non-blocking command prompt window (eg you could go back to Softimage), but this next snippet would prevent Softmage from responding until you closed the command prompt:
import os
os.system("cmd /k %s -licensecheck" % sKick)
Saturday snippet – Tuple assignment
Early this week, I posted a script that did a random shuffle of a collection of objects. That script used tuple assignment to swap elements in a list; here’s a simpler example, with the tuple assignment (line 9) highlighted:
import random v = [o for o in Application.Selection] print [o.Name for o in v] # random shuffle for i in range( len(v) ): j = random.randint( i, len(v)-1 ) v[i], v[j] = v[j], v[i] print [o.Name for o in v] # [u'cube', u'cube1', u'cube2', u'cube3', u'cube4', u'cube5', u'cube6', u'cube7', u'cube8'] # [u'cube5', u'cube4', u'cube7', u'cube2', u'cube1', u'cube3', u'cube', u'cube8', u'cube6']
Looking at that line, you might wonder why you don’t end up assigning the same value to both a[i] and a[j] (eg, how does that line not do a[i] = a[j] and then a[j] = a[i] ?).
In tuple assignment, the right-hand side is considered a tuple of values. So the right-hand side is evaluated first, and then the resulting values are pairwise assigned to the tuple on the left hand side. For example, consider this-rather-more-concrete snippet:
a = 2 b = 8 a,b = b-a,b+a print a print b # 6 # 10
The right-hand side “b-a,b+a” is first evaluated, giving the tuple 6, 10, so you effectively have this:
a,b = 6,10
Scripting – Shuffling a collection to randomly select by percentage
Via a tech-artists.org tweet, I came across some MAXScript for randomly selecting a specified percentage of mesh elements (for example, give me a random selection that includes 35% of all vertices).
I converted it to Python in Softimage. Note that I don’t really shuffle a collection: you can’t set items in a collection, so there’s no way to swap items. Instead, I put the collection in a list and shuffle the list.
Shuffling actually makes this harder than it has to be. Check out Alan’s nice script for a better way to do this.
si = Application
log = si.LogMessage
sisel = si.Selection
#http://creativescratchpad.blogspot.ca/2011/06/select-random-elements-by-percentage.html
import random
#
# Return a list that includes a randomly selected
# percentage of the items in a collection
#
def get_random_percentage( collection, percentage ):
v = [x for x in collection]
# random shuffle
for i in range( len(v) ):
j = random.randint( i, len(v)-1 )
v[i], v[j] = v[j], v[i]
# select by percentage
step = 100/percentage
w = []
for i in xrange( 0, len(v), step ):
w.append( v[i] )
# print len(w)
# print (percentage/100.0) * len(v)
return w
Application.SelectObj("torus", "", True)
# Select a random 50% of the vertices
x = get_random_percentage( sisel(0).ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Vertices, 50 )
si.SelectObj(x)
print sisel(0).SubComponent.ComponentCollection.Count
# Suppose you had 2000 cubes.
# Select a random 25% of those 2000...
Application.SelectObj("cube*", "", True)
x = get_random_percentage( sisel, 25 )
si.SelectObj(x)
I learned a couple of things about MAXScript:
- MAXScript arrays are 1-based
- In the MaxScript docs, there aren’t any function/method reference pages. You have to go to a “value” page (eg Number Values) and there you’ll find all the methods. That’s fine once you know, but it was confusing at first when I didn’t see anything in the TOC for Functions or Methods.
Saturday Snippet – XSICollections and CollectionItems
When you stick something, like say a Vertex, into an XSICollection, you get a CollectionItem. But you can get back to the Vertex if you know how (via the SubComponent
).
si = Application log = si.LogMessage sisel = si.Selection import win32com.client oColl = win32com.client.Dispatch( "XSI.Collection" ) o = sisel(0) print si.ClassName( o.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Vertices(0) ) # Vertex #oColl.Add( o.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Vertices(0) ) oColl.AddItems( o.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Vertices ) print si.ClassName( oColl(0) ) # CollectionItem print si.ClassName( oColl(0).SubComponent.ComponentCollection(0) ) # Vertex a = o.ActivePrimitive.Geometry.Vertices(0) b = oColl(0).SubComponent.ComponentCollection(0) print a.IsEqualTo(b) # True print b.IsEqualTo(a) # True
Saturday snippet – simple example of Python list comprehensions
Here’s something I was trying to do in ICE (without using any Repeats).
Given an array like
a = [ 5, 2 ,3 ]
create an array like
b = [ 0, 0, 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2 ]
See the pattern? (a[0] is 5, so array b has five elements with value 0).
In Python, using list comprehension, you can do it like this:
a = [ 5, 2, 3 ] print [ i for i in range( len(a) ) for j in range( a[i] )]
The list comprehension is the equivalent of:
for i in range( len(a) ): for j in range( a[i] ): print i
Scripting – Finding the objects in different SimulationEnvironments
Here’s a script that goes through the SimulationEnvironments of a scene and find the 3d objects in each SimulationEnvironment. This snippet builds a dictionary of 3d objects, indexed by simulation environment.
from siutils import si
si = si() # win32com.client.Dispatch('XSI.Application')
from siutils import log # LogMessage
from siutils import disp # win32com.client.Dispatch
from siutils import C # win32com.client.constants
from xml.etree import ElementTree as ET
# Use a dictionary to store the 3d objects keyed by Environmen
dict = {}
for e in si.ActiveProject2.ActiveScene.SimulationEnvironments:
stack = XSIUtils.DataRepository.GetConnectionStackInfo( e.SimulationTimeControl )
xmlRoot = ET.fromstring( stack )
for xmlConnections in xmlRoot.findall('connection'):
o = xmlConnections.find( 'object' )
dict[ si.Dictionary.GetObject( o.text ).Parent3DObject.FullName ] = e.FullName
log( "3DObjects and their SimulationEnvironments" )
for key, value in dict.items():
log( "\t%s, %s" % (key,value) )
log( "" )
log( "SimulationEnvironments and 3DObjects" )
dictvals = set( dict.values() )
for env in dictvals:
log( "\t%s" % env )
list = [k for k, v in dict.iteritems() if v == env]
for o in list:
log( "\t\t%s" % o )
Here’s some sample output from the script:
# INFO : 3DObjects and their SimulationEnvironments # INFO : pointcloud1, Environments.Environment # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud2, Environments.Environment1 # INFO : grid, Environments.Environment # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud1, Environments.Environment1 # INFO : pointcloud, Environments.Environment # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud, Environments.Environment1 # INFO : # INFO : SimulationEnvironments and 3DObjects # INFO : Environments.Environment1 # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud2 # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud1 # INFO : Point_cloud_chaser.pointcloud # INFO : Environments.Environment # INFO : pointcloud1 # INFO : grid # INFO : pointcloud
Saturday snippet – checking if two objects are the same
Use IsEqualTo, don’t use your scriping language equality comparison operaor. For example, here I’m using IsEqualTo to check if an object’s material is the Scene_Material.
si = Application print si.Selection(0).Material.IsEqualTo( si.ActiveProject.ActiveScene.Root.Material )
Checking the environment of a running program
Sometimes when you’re troubleshooting, it’s a good idea to check the environment in which Softimage is running.
You can check specific environment variables in the script editor like this:
import os print os.getenv( "XSI_USERHOME" ) print os.getenv( "TEMP" )
or like this:
print XSIUtils.Environment("XSI_BINDIR")
But I would typically use Process Explorer to see the full environment:
or Process Monitor (in Process Monitor, you just have to find the Process Start operation for XSI.exe and double-click it).
eX-SI 