PMM User Interface

Making a bit of progress on the UI for PMM yay.  It's weird but I found it waaay easier to make the other scripts.  Scripting a UI just feels really clumsy or maybe it's because I haven't gotten quite used to it yet. /shrug

 The first UI I ever created and I'm just so proud ^_^.

Hooked on MEL

Ah yes some of the chaos from my recent move is mellowing out.  Anyways, I've been hearing for years that being able to script in Maya is the shiznite and I totally believe it, I just didn't think I was the script minded type. But recently, I finally got a real “what the hell, why not” moment and decided to jump into MEL, I wanted to make something practical [but simple of course].My goal was to make a script that would create a 35mm render camera with a dark gray gate mask, film pivot, film origin and also slap an mia_exposure_photographic lens with a Cm2 factor of 100000 on it.  Doing this manually is easy but just a bit “click intensive” for what it is, so it just becomes tedious.  That in itself was surprisingly easy to script [the node and command ref in the help docs kick ass] but that snowballed into “Why not make a camera with aim instead?” and then  “hmmm I wonder if I can slap a bokeh lens shader on that too” then that quickly turned into “Hey, I bet can setup a distance measurement and feed that into  the bokeh lens shader” [Also  I'm really leaning towards having the script detect the physical sky [if there is one] and plug that into the environment slot of the camera.]That worked but the generic names would become a problem so I decided to make a simple interface with a name input field and a “Create” button and that turned me onto the magical world of global procedures and variables.

Ok so the interface has a looooong way to go but for now its good enough for testing.

 I made the distance locator independent of the aim, as it allows getting different values without screwing with the aiming of the camera.