Maya Tool

I started working on an early set of features and UI for the tool, and I thought it might be a good idea to show off the progress I've made before Thursday.

As you can see here, what I have now is very basic, but should hopefully give you guys enough of an idea of things I know I can do in MEL.

The first two features are meant as basic practice for me, and will simply create a sphere with a texture and fill its transparency attribute with white, and then do the same with any other object. A shortcut to automatic mapping is also provided so that you can create your UVs there before having textures auto generated.

The fourth button is meant to save you the trouble of drawing a 3D paint texture in the color attribute and also outlining its silhouette with transparency. It shades the pixels unpainted in Color as opaque in Transparency.

The fifth button registers the 3D paint tool as a hotkey in Maya (cmd+Enter), so you can switch into it really quickly.

These are all features that will be used once per object per scene, either before or after all the painting is done. I want to add more for the during period, so if there's anything that you'd like to be automated, please tell me. Hotkeys and shortcuts are particularly simple to make in MEL and useful to animators, and they can be created by scripts like this one.