Compile a couple of tools in python for Maya

Hello everyone! first time poster here,

I have downloaded some tools from the Tool Chef website (toolchefs dot com), I have downloaded 2 tools, key reducer and camera lattice, unfortunately when I emailed them for installing instructions they said that these tools are open source so they don’t support them anymore, and that I will have to find someone to compile them for me, please help me and tell me how I can install these? and if possible could you compile this code into a workable tool that I can put on my shelf. Thanks in advance

Key Reducer - https://www.toolchefs.com/?portfolio=camera-lattice

Camera Lattice - https://www.toolchefs.com/?portfolio=key-reducer

I don’t have the time to compile these plugins for you but I can point you in the right direction.

I’m going to use the Camera Lattice tool for my example but both tools are structured the same way so getting them working should be the same process for each.

These tools have two parts

  1. A maya plugin (.mll) and
  2. Python code with contains UI and calls functions that are loaded with the plugin.

To run the python part of the tool, you must import the tcCameraLattice.py file from cameraLattice/python/tcCameraLattice/ and call tcCameraLattice.run() in python.

The python code won’t work alone unless you compile the plugin code to an .mll for your version of maya and put that file somewhere that’s on MAYA_PLUG_IN_PATH. “…/documents/maya/plug-ins/” works.

All of the plugin source files (C++) are in the cameraLattice/include and the cameraLattice/source folders.To compile the plugin you’ll have to download the maya devkit for your maya version from here and then include it in a visual studio project with those source files in order to build the .mll. This is going to be the most annoying part of the process, but it’s not as complicated as it seems at first.

I learned how to build maya plugins from this free tutorial by Chad Vernon.

One last thing to keep in mind, since these tools are a little old now and no longer supported, they likely won’t run in Maya 2022 without modification if you’re using Python 3.

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