Houdini has a nice little function in Python in the hou namespace called hscript. You can pass in a string for an hscript command. It passes back out a tuple with stdout and stderr strings. This is dandy, but it would be nice to call hscript commands with (in essence) Python syntax. So I made a little class that does just that.

class HscriptWrapper(object):
    commands = hou.hscript('help')[0]
    commands = frozenset(commands.split())

    def __getattr__(self, attr):
        if attr not in self.commands:
            raise AttributeError('No hscript command by name "%s"' % attr)
        # cache for future calls
        self.__dict__[attr] = rattr = self._command_factory(attr)
        return rattr

    def _command_factory(self, attr):
        def cmd(*args, **kwargs):
            fmt = '{cmd} {flags} {args}'
            hsargs = ' '.join(args)
            hsflags = []
            for k, v in kwargs.items():
                if isinstance(v, bool) and v is True:
                    hsflags.append('-' + k)
                else:
                    hsflags.append('-{0} {1}'.format(k, v))
            hsflags = ' '.join(hsflags)
            hscmd = fmt.format(cmd=attr, flags=hsflags, args=hsargs)
            return hou.hscript(hscmd)
        cmd.__name__ = attr
        cmd.__doc__ = hou.hscript('help {}'.format(attr))[0]
        return cmd

To use it, create an instance of the HscriptWrapper class, then access hscript commands as attributes of the instance. The returned attribute is a callable function that takes positional and keyword arguments.

I am generally pretty sad with the number of free tutorials about Houdini rigging. Thus, I have started a series of them on youtube. They aren’t polished or even really planned out before hand. Really, they are little more than just stream of consciousness, but they have information, which is the important part. If you are interested in certain topics relating to Houdini rigging, post a comment and let me know what you want me to cover next.

Hey, it has been a while since I last posted anything. I apologize to some of you since this post is going to be rather techie/geekie. It is more as a reminder to myself about how to do this than anything else.

Earlier today, I was furiously trying to find a utility on Linux to take a CD/DVD and create an ISO image from it. I was coming up dry and was feeling a bit frustrated until I stumbled onto this website. Once I read it I felt like a complete moron. Why did I feel so stupid? One of the great things about Linux, BSD, Mac OS X and pretty much every other OS descended from Unix is that everything is a file. Literally everything. And I had forgotten that disc drives (including optical drives) fall well within the category of “everything”.

Recently had a friend share this link with me. It made me happy to be a vegetarian.

1 comment:

1. 

   Unknown October 5, 2010 at 6:28 AM

   I always thought that calling it ’ mechanically-separated’ meant that they were trying to distract you away from the next obvious question: which parts?

Hi y’all. I found this video (UPDATE: previously linked video was an old flash player embed and no longer exists) and it got me to thinking about special effects and how we perceive them. Even though everyone in the studio audience had undoubtedly seen blockbuster films with eye fooling special effects, they went wild for this performance of a rather simple concept. Don’t misunderstand me; what they are doing is extremely difficult. However, something is often more impressive to us when we can understand the effort put into it.

Hey everyone, sorry for the total lack of posts lately. I have some stuff to upload. I just need to find some time to do it. I promise within the next couple of days I will have some of my recent projects up on the site for comments and critiques. Until then, take this post as a sign of good faith.

Hey everyone, this isn’t a common theme of my usual blog postings as I don’t follow basketball whatsoever very closely, but I found this interesting as it concerns the president. My friend Derrick Bowen posted it on his twitter account which is how I found out.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/blog/2010/03/17/president-picks-his-favorites-2010-ncaa-basketball-tournament

Hey all, here is my first animation project as promised. It is (drum roll) a bouncing ball! I know it is not terribly exciting and, like a said before, my work is of amateur level right now (which makes sense since I am just starting out). However, animating a bouncing ball is a good first exercise for someone learning animation as it teaches principles of timing, spacing and squash & stretch. Instead of focusing on draftsmanship a student can just focus on motion and animation. At least, that is what the people who know tell me and I am inclined to believe them.

Hey everyone, welcome to the new blog.

Stuff will be posted! Comments will be made! Reality television announcers will be parodied!

But really, feel free to follow, comment and discuss. I’ll soon post an animation project I have been working on (once it is completed). Be aware that it is my first attempt at traditional hand drawn animation so it will look pretty amateur.

Best wishes and talk to you all soon.

I hope you all like the reference to Immigrant Song by Led Zeppelin. It has absolutely nothing to do with the remainder of this post.

Howdy! It has been quite some time since I last made any updates to this blog. The reason? Utter and complete failure in the Nokia Tablet Experiment. Although I was able to make phone calls via my Nokia tablet, there were insurmountable problems that plagued the setup of the system. The biggest problems were due to the ways the university implements their networks and their wifi.

Here are some screen shots to assuage your curiosity and give you an idea of what this nifty little device can do. Keep in mind that somethings may be blurred out to protect sensitive information of others and myself.

Here is the main page of the tablet. As you can see, there are a number of widgets that are both pre-installed on the machine and that can be download from the maemo.org website:

First post made from the Nokia N810. This is an incredible little machine. It has far exceeded my expectations. I have already installed the Gizmo SIP application (I learned that it integrates with Google Voice by design, making it the clearer choice over Skype). I can receive calls on the tablet, albeit with some work arounds. Hopefully I will have these cleared up soon. I will post a more thorough step by step review in the next few days (on a larger keyboard). For now, let us leave it at how amazing this little machine is: mind-boggling amazingness. Adios until next time.

Some may be wondering what The Nokia Tablet Experiment is, or why my wife and I have decided to embark on it. So, let me explain.

First, the reasoning. My wife and I are poor college students. We currently have a family cellphone plan for the two of us with a major mobile phone provider which has recently expired. We are paying month to month now until we can find a new solution or decide to renew our contract for another two years. As we have been crunching the numbers for the budget lately we have noticed that our phone plan (the cheapest one the provider offers) was adding up to about $1000 per year! This is with a 14% DISCOUNT tacked on that we received as a promotion! That is money that could go towards tuition, books for classes, dates consisting of more than a walk to the park and a shared $1.50 ice cream cone, etc.. We have shopped around at other mobile phone carriers and the price is comparable. At most we could save a couple dollars per month.