Selected Tag: callback

2 posts

OpenMaya Callbacks instead of Maya ScriptJobs

Whenever you want something to happen when your selection in Maya changes, the first thing that comes into your mind might be Maya ScriptJobs. However I find them very slow and not reliable, especially since they are wrapped in mel. Better use a callback from OpenMaya’s messaging system. This is how you do it: You will have to create a function that is called every time the selection changes. Make it run fast and with lots of error checking to avoid making your tool too slow. In your function, get the selection and evaluate what you want to do with it. The function could look something like this:

Don’t worry, you don’t have to use maya API but you can use pymel or even maya.cmds instead. In my example I just print the names of the selected nodes however I would avoid any prints as they are slowing down […]

Modify File References before they are loaded

When working on multiple projects you might want to use assets from other projects. Very often a file referencing pipeline makes this difficult though as Maya stores file references with absolute paths when you are not using Maya projects. To avoid this you can hijack the Referencing procedure with a callback.

The callback triggers any function you define. In the function you have access to the file path of the reference to do some checks and you can cancel the loading of the reference or manipulate the path to your liking. Create a function somewhere in your pipeline. Your function needs 3 parameters: parameter 1 is the return code (a boolean to approve or cancel the reference load operation) parameter 2 is the file object which holds the path and file information parameter 3 is client data which you can pass in to your function from the callback

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