Smapdimation

Python is a popular programming tool for many uses, not just in the 3D animation world. Now that most major 3D applications support Python in some form it’s becoming quite popular for technical artists, riggers and animators.

Generally speaking Python is powerful and easily accessible for new programmers. It reads like English, and has limited funky characters. For example declaring a string variable and printing it looks like this in MEL …

string $myVariable = "Smapdi";
print ("My nickname is " + $myVariable);


The python version reads …

myVariable = "Smapdi"
print "My nickname is " + myVariable

If your unsure what variables are and if none of the code above makes any sense, don’t worry I’ll be explaining in detail with future posts. Hopefully at this point you can recognize how light weight and easy to read python is. In my next post we will cover the tools and basics for writing Python.