The Wonderful World of PyQt, PySide and Autodesk Maya

One of the core components of an animation pipeline is customization. Inside your studios tools and workflows are each created a little differently within your pipeline to best optimize the Autodesk software for your unique needs. The customizations and tools you create need equally important User Interfaces to go along with them. Most times, these User Interfaces need to be customized to go side by side with the tools, and this can be done with ease using PyQt or PySide. ​

In this session we will explore two Python Qt toolkits, PyQt and PySide and how you can use them to create custom User Interfaces (UI) inside of Autodesk Maya. Like the name suggests PyQt/PySide, is a combination of the Python Language and the Qt toolkit. In other words, PyQt/PySide is a set of Python bindings for the Qt toolkit. PyQt/PySide is a good choice for you when more demanding UI’s are required, as they combine all the advantages of Qt and Python.​

​We will examine the build process needed to work with the PyQt and PySide modules to allow you to get started in the wonderful world of UI building.

We will determine which Python binding toolkit is right for you by looking at the pros and cons of using PyQt and PySide. And last but not least we will examine some real world Maya examples and how to work with these toolkits inside of Maya, where you will soon find out the sky is the limit on the creativity in your UI.​