FYI, finally available to general public at:

http://www.lulu.com/content/1842341

Sponsored by Autodesk for 2007 Siggraph MasterClasses. CD-ROM includes:

118 page PowerPoint presentation
72 page Full Documentation
21 Scripts
6 Scenes
2 text files
8 .mov videos capturing 1 hour 20 minute lecture

Cost = 40 bucks.

I made this for newbies to get up to speed very quickly. If you go over this for a couple of hours, you’ll save yourself a ton of time.

We can use this thread for questions and comments about my material if you like.

Thanks,

-jason

thanks for the link, that look the ticket for those of us looking to dive into Python for MB.
cheers!

I just got my company to buy this for me and I just got it today. So with in the next few days I’ll watch it.

I wish I had this about 6 months ago when I started to get into it and going through the aches and pains. So I hope there are some things in here I didn’t know or help me understand something. So I’ll definitely write some comments. I’m sure no matter what it is a huge help to the community to get awareness and hopefully more information about this.

Thanks !!

senglert 04 February 2008 09:11 PM

I just got my company to buy this for me and I just got it today. ..

I’ve also requested the purchase of this material to the my company’s training department, hopefully I’ll be able to post some comments on it soon.

Senglert,

This material was made for you where you were 6 months ago (I’m guessing). But you may still get something out of it, like: clarification on the pyfbsdk Reference Guide documentation, enumerators, some decent examples of the few UI types. A lot of it has been covered in this and the old forum. But it is a nice concise compilation of material.

There’s also a pretty good utility script in there with a whole bunch of handy defintions.

The “real world” example is a pretty cool trick Brad and I came up with, so you might find that handy. If anything, it got Autodesk to finally fix the Character Pose class in Python!

Hopefully it will remove the big barrier to entry to newbs and we’ll have more people participating here because of it.

Thanks for your support,

-jason

-jason

Well I watched the video, I haven’t had time to open the PDF with the other information but if you don’t mind I would like to post some comments.

I do believe that this subject is too large to cover in just one training video to bring someone with no experience up to speed to be able to write their own scripts, so I understand it would take too long to hold their hand through understanding all the complex concepts of python itself because, as you said if you don’t understand python and object oriented programming fundamentals then you won’t grasp the class hierarchy or where to look for what you need.

One thing that I would liked to see in the video that would have helped me in the beginning is a little lesson on how to properly interpret the documentation as far as how to read and then enter in a specific function with the necessary input needed to return what you want. Such as if you use this function it will return a string rather than a strange object type if you use this function. You touched it a little with going over the structure of the classes, however I found that just trying to read the documentation and getting my attributes and values confused made it harder for me to pick it up. That is just my experience when I was learning. The MB documentation is daunting at first until you get the hang of it and then it makes sense. Again, this may be better explained in the PDF that I haven’t opened yet, this is just based on the video.

I took a quick look through your included tools and that I feel will help people the most is the code itself and reading the comments to follow along. One thing that MB python community is lacking is scripts to learn from besides the few that come with MB. So thank you!

Overall I think is great material to get someone who is interested in MB python and getting their feet wet and showing where to start. I wish someone could have sat down and introduced me everything you talked about to save me lots of frustration on understanding where to go and why.

So cheers! definitely going to keep this handy for future reference. I hope it does bring an awareness to others so we can build a stronger community and increased support in MB to do even more.

Thanks!
-Scott

This is were I started, and I thought it was a great lesson, I recommend reading the PDF and watching the DVD a few times each. It took me a few times to soak in all the information and put it all together. I also suggest picking up a python book to get a better understanding of the flow of things. This is the book I have at my side: Python book at Amazon.com

This book, this forum and the DVD/PDF are my tools.

Kodos and good look to all.

The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.
~Walt Disney

Awesome. Hope it helps a bit.

I agree. A beginner these days can get ramped up pretty quick with the help of my course. And now with this forum ( and KXl’s contirubtions!), there is continued support for everybody. Then a good Python book for reference and encouragement to expand one’s skills rounds it out pretty good.

Hopefully we’ll get more users and more skills sharing info here.

-jason

I havent seen your classes Jason, but from it content looks like very good material for lerning. You put a lot of work into it and it definitely can be helpful.

Also reading programming books is a good approach, becouse they learn some basic concepts.

And as the last step is writing, looking for a bugs and sharing on the forum. Everyone is learning from this.

I found what might be an error:

The section talked about creating message boxes, the PDF makes the call:

FBMessageBoxCheckBox

However, the real call, according to MB is :

FBMessageBoxWithCheck

Not sure if this is a version difference (I am running 7.5 Ext 1)

Overall, the Masterclass is pretty awesome and would recommend this and the Character Animation one, as well.

Great work!

LoCK

You are correct sir!

Typo. My bad. Would be great if that was the only one.

Glad you enjoyed it. Hope it helps. Thanks for the kind words.

-jason

Ok guys i may be the biggest noob here but ive been looking thru jason’s MB masterclass

and what i want to know is how do i get motionbuilder to display the pyfbsdk.pyd? or even is that file viewed using MB?

jason talks on page 15 of the .pdf about the three views that tell u what MB classes exist- how do i display that?

this is prolly a really stoopid question

sheper,

I’m refereing to the built-in MotionBuilder documentation.

1. Open MotionBuilder,
2. goto the ‘Help’ Menu
3. select ‘MotionBuilder Help’,
4. click on the ‘Python Scripting 7.5 Help’ tab
5. click on the ‘Python Scripting 7.5 Reference Guide (pyfbsdk)’ in the contents column on the left

‘File List’ gives you a link to the pyfbsdk.h (not very helpful really)
Here are all of your other views of the classes as well.

-jason

thanks jase, i wasn’t sure if it was one of motionbuilder’s drag and drop into the scene jobs or what…

i’m basically trying to expand my skillset, i’m not the techiest of animators but i’m right in thinking learning python is going to be good for my career right?

i know the main motionbuilder functionality like the back of my hand and i just thought python wd be the next logical step in my development

:o)

Learning MoBu Python is great for your career. There is a lot of demand for people to automate MotionBuilder processes in the industry.

Besides that, it is a good way to start to become familiar with Python. I think you’ll start to really like the Python language. The more you use it, the more you realize that it is the language of choice these days and that there is practically nothing you can’t do with it. You can use it outside of MotionBuilder to make lots and lots of tools for your company.

Welcome to Level 2!

-jason

cheers jason

appreciate that! in fairness it shd be easier doin this in concert w/ motionbuilder- in a way im guessing even being able to set up macro scripts of repetitive MB tasks will be a help

all the best