The seventh alpha release of cgkit2 and v0.9.3 of the Maya/Python package is available at http://cgkit.sourceforge.net What is it? ----------- The Python Computer Graphics Kit is an Open Source software package containing a collection of Python modules, plugins and utilities that are meant to be useful for any domain where you have to deal with 3D data of any kind, be it for visualization, creating photorealistic images, Virtual Reality or even games. Currently, the entire kit consists of the following parts: - The Python package "cgkit" that extends Python with 3D-related functionality. - The Maya plugin "sourcepy" that integrates the Python interpreter into Maya, and the accompanying Python package "maya" that makes Maya functionality available in Python. - A collection of small stand-alone utilities written in Python, MEL or MaxScript. What's new? ----------- cgkit: - The license of cgkit has changed from LGPL to a MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license. The Maya/Python package is available under the MPL. - The built-in preprocessor has been improved so that common preprocessor directives are supported. This means the slparams module can now parse RenderMan shaders that use simple macros or include files without having to fall back to an external preprocessor. - other smaller bugfixes and enhancements (see changelog) Maya/Python: - The MEL command "python" has been renamed to "py". - There are now 260 classes from the Maya SDK available. This is about 85% of the Maya 7 SDK. The newly wrapped classes mainly consist of the message classes. - The MUserEventMessage can also be used to communicate with C++ plug-ins. - The number of "dead" methods in the api module (i.e. methods that have been wrapped but that were not callable in Python) has been reduced. These are methods that, for example, take pointers as arguments or return values by reference and that cannot be dealt with in an entirely automatic fashion. There are still such methods left, so let me know if you stumble across one of those cases. - Improved string handling in the mel module. - Multi-threading support. This means you can create a new thread in Python and this thread keeps running even when the py or pySource MEL command that was used to execute the Python code has terminated. This functionality is used for the new "remote" functionality (see below). - New sub-package "remote" that allows you to execute any MEL command from external scripts. This means you can control Maya from Python scripts that run outside Maya or even on a different machine. - Writing plug-ins in Python has become more safe as Python exceptions are now caught in the proxy wrapper classes where the traceback is printed and a status code of kFailure is returned to Maya. For more information, visit: http://cgkit.sourceforge.net Feedback is always welcome... - Matthias -