Procedural text?

[ptb]

Is there a texture for procedural text out there somewhere? This would be really helpful...

[joojaa]

Theres one for renderman. in general ist not terribly efficent to do this. See rasterizing a spline bound area is much more efficent than doing per pixel test.

So just makeing  a expression that will automatically rasterize the text to file you use just before render is probably perfectly valid and its more efficent since its easier to filter (fitering is every animaion render tds biggest concern ), its also MUCH easier to to do even you should manage it without any new programming using the builtin imagemagic.

[joojaa]

PTB- argh i screwed up so your answer is gone. My bad!

Do you haev any demo data of wahts IN the database? Makes it easier to think. Easiest is NOT to use photoshop for scripting but something like imagamagic but mileagae may wary..

Scripting photosop is not THAT hard.

[ptb]

PTB- argh i screwed up so your answer is gone. My bad!

Do you haev any demo data of wahts IN the database? Makes it easier to think. Easiest is NOT to use photoshop for scripting but something like imagamagic but mileagae may wary..

Scripting photosop is not THAT hard.

Thanks for the Imagemagick hint, didn't know this existed. So am i mistaken if I think it will be as simple as
string $newtexttexture = system("imagemagick.exe -makenicetext "txt" -savetofile "nicefile"");  ?
That would be great.

The form of the database isn't decided yet, but if it could be a text table like this:

Index | Filename | Description | GPS | Connections
01 | D:\bla.jpg | "blabla" | 7.03508 50.345045089 | {04,089,34}

(it could also end up being xml - depends how good the parsing works).

so the "blabla" is supposed to be the description converted into a text-ure...

I know that ps scripting isn't that hard... but how would i remote control PS from Maya?

[joojaa]

Well not quite but close (maya ships with imagamagick its called imconvert, it does HOWEVER not ship the file type-ghostscript.xml or other related gostscript things throws a arreor but works):

system("imconvert -background lightblue -fill blue -font coolFont -pointsize 72 label:\"yourText\" outputFileName.png");

see http://www.imagemagick.org/Usage/text/#label

now i suggest you download imagemagick from the site above, but if you must the problem with imconvert can be easily ignored, but yes i digress just load it. Anyway even the bastardzed imconvert is very usefull.

[joojaa]

but how would i remote control PS from Maya?

well youd need to copy over the com programming module resources to maya python/site-packages, no biggie. And then just use pythons com bridge, which is the same as the vbscript examples just in python.

[ptb]

Thanks, I think this will work!
The PS remote is over my head at the moment - but one day... oh yes.

[joojaa]

imagemagick is a VERY good tool to know of.

The PS remote is over my head at the moment

Ok gimme a holler whan that happens.

[chris-rogers]

hey

you could easily write one in MEL.

imageMagick is really useful.  i think http://www.graphicsmagick.org/ is a more modern version of the same commands.

my advice is to learn how to do it in Photoshop.  Scripting photoshop is incredibly useful, at least it was for me as a Technical Artist.

you would have more fonts available with photoshop i think and more controls over the appearance.

as for "remote controlling photoshop from maya", that's a little trickier.

one option is to write a javascript for photoshop that reads in a textfile of the stuff you want in the texure.  i think you can
system("file.jsx") with MEL and it should start photoshop if the .jsx file is set to run photoshop when doubleclicked (see the adobe photoshop scripting guides to set that up).  not sure about that.

waiting for photoshop to start each time might take too long.... depending on how many times you start photoshop

also, you can leave photoshop and your job client javascript running on the same machine as maya, and have your script check a file or directory every 30 seconds or so.  when it finds something new/changed, then it makes its new texture, then goes back to sleep waiting for the next one.  i wrote a job client in photoshop that worked like this.  every 30 seconds it would ask the server for a new job....

the trick i used to access the database from photoshop was to write a .bat file from photoshop that had the info request in it, then execute that batch file.  the batch file would use the free program wget to fetch info from a webserver.  my webserver had perl scripts to access and format the mysql data.  the .bat file tells wget to save the output to a local file.  photoshop would then read in that text file and parse it for the data.   when photoshop called the .bat file, it is not blocking, ie: photoshop starts a child process and keeps running, so the javascript needs to wait and check for the .bat file saying its done by saving a text file when it starts, meaning that its running, a "lock" file.  when the .bat is done, it erases the .lock file.  photoshop keeps checking for the .lock file to disappear, or for a timeout period in case the .bat doesnt finish.

hope this helps somebody

chris

[joojaa]

Scripting photoshop is incredibly useful, at least it was for me as a Technical Artist.

Well maybe however its also about 20 times slower, and uses much memory overhead. than using imagemagick. Better yet maya ships with imagemagick so theres no need to install anything it just works* But here its the simplicity of things, its faster, and in this case imagemagic does this with less learning. This thats what he should do.

Its cross platform so it works on all 3 maya supported platforms unlike photoshop. And its free which means you could process make 100,000 complex files on a cloud machine without needing to use your own machine to do it. So if you need  something that takes minute per picture you can jsut do it in a few minutes instead of waiting many days for a dollar or so of money in computer rent.

But mileage may vary so yes PS can be scripted just not worlds most usefull thing to automate. If you need to batch a LOT of stuff. Also PS is not the definitive gold standard in image manipulation, for one PS is unable to deal with negative values very well.

graphics magick is very good too..

you would have more fonts available with photoshop i think and more controls over the appearance.

err atleast on windows you have all the same fonts.

as for "remote controlling photoshop from maya", that's a little trickier.

Not really atleast NOT on windows. photoshop comes with 3 API's.

Actionscript
COM
and javascript

Now the COM inetrface is described as a VB interface in the scripting guides. However COM works on ANY LANGUAGE. So python can call photoshop directly, which makes it worndefully easy to do on any windows machine. All you need is to download the com components to your system. (maya python doenst actually contain them by default, but tey are free and easy to hunt down)

system("file.jsx") with MEL and it should start photoshop if the .jsx file is set to run photoshop when doubleclicked

system("start file.jsx")

should be safer atleast on windooze. but seriously just run it in your python interpretter its WAY easier, thisway you can jsut dump data from maya whenever you need it. Except thet PS jsx scripting does actually leak a bit so it should be cleared every so sn so loong by restering photoshop.

also, you can leave photoshop and your job client javascript running on the same machine as maya, and have your
script check a file or directory every 30 seconds or so

ever heard of file notifications? Much more effective. Instead of chek every so and so. think make event and act when something DOES happen.

*something not to be taken lightly, as this means I can make a script that works on the clients machine just as long as they have maya isntalled.