Wednesday 7 October 2015

tbtools - useful animation scripts! - installation guide

Hey!


I've been collecting some of my animation related tools together into a package to share and hopefully save someone some time whilst animating!

Once installed I've tried to make it nice and easy to get started, all commands that are normally run on hotkeys are automatically added into your hotkey editor under the categories tbtools_*blahblah*

Installation guide:

This guide assumes you are running windows and you know where the user/maya folder is. By that I mean the "C:\Users\user\Documents\maya" folder
Firstly you'll need the tbtools package downloaded

Download the zip file here:

https://github.com/tb-animator/tbtools/archive/master.zip


  1. Once downloaded, make a folder in your user/maya folder called "tbtools"
  2. Extract the contents of "tbtool-master" from the zip file into the "user/maya/tbtools" folder
  3. If you don't already have a folder called "modules" in your user/maya directory, make one
  4. Copy the tbtools.mod file from the tbtools folder to the new modules folder
  5. You should have a folder structure like this:
  6. Now, you'll need to edit the tbtools.mod file to have the correct directory name. Sorry this isn't automated yet. Open the tbtools.mod in a text editor and change the directory path(s) to match your user\maya\tbtools\ directory name, eg:

  7. Important! The file path needs to be set for your version of maya, if your version of maya isn't mentioned in the list, change one of the "MAYAVERSION:2015" lines to match yours.
  8. Also important! You have to have the "\" at the end of the path.
  9. Ok! all going well, when you load maya, you should see this message in your output window
  10. If you don't, double check your file paths are all correct and the tbtools.mod is in the right place. It's ok to have the original tbtools.mod still in the maya/tbtools folder as well.
  11. "Fun" fact, the .mod file is just adding some python paths to maya, so we can check if the module did it's job by running this python code:
  12. In maya you should see some tbtools folders in the result:
  13. Now, have a look in your hotkey editor. You should see a bunch of new tools
  14. Have a play around, actual docs on how to use the tools coming soon. Any questions welcome!

4 comments:

  1. Looks interesting but can't for the life of me get it to load. Doesn't seem to read the module file (notice windows thinks its a 'movie' file but whatever).

    Have gone through all the steps multiple times but I'm probably missing something. Thanks for posting anyway :)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I have a hard time getting this stuff to run myself, have you opened the .mod in notepad to edit it? When I'm a bit better at python I'll make an installer ;) When I've made more puppets I'll do a video!

      Without the module you can still get things to load, if you put the tbtools folder in docs/maya/scripts then try
      import tbtools.apps.tb_viewModes as vm or similar it should work.
      or
      from tbtools import *

      Delete
    2. Hi Tom, thanks for the quick reply :)

      Yeah I tried editing the module file in Notepad. For some reason windows doesnt see the '.mod' extension but I guess maya should know what it is when in the modules folder.

      Tried importing via your method above and I guess it loads the tools but doesn't automatically add the hotkeys.
      Anyway guess I should wait until you describe what the tools actually do rather than being so impatient! ;)

      Thanks again

      Delete
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