Guidrawer

Guidrawer is a utility tool for the rigging framework mGear. It is designed to assist "custom" guide drawing during rigging operations on Maya.

Installation

A. Maya module

1. Copy this repository to your Maya modules directory as guidrawer.

   • Windows: %USERPROFILE%\Documents\maya\modules\guidrawer
   • macOS: ~/Library/Preferences/Autodesk/maya/modules/guidrawer
   • Linux: ~/maya/modules/guidrawer

2. Copy guidrawer.mod from the repository to the same modules directory (next to the guidrawer folder).

3. Restart Maya.

After restart, import guidrawer is available without changing PYTHONPATH or sys.path. The MEL menu entries in scripts/ are also loaded automatically.

B. From a release

1. Open the Releases page and download the ZIP for the version you want
2. Extract the archive to a location of your choice
3. Install using A. Maya module above, or add the extracted python directory to PYTHONPATH in Maya.env:

Usage

To use Guidrawer as GUI on Maya, follow these steps:

1. Import the module: import guidrawer
2. Call the show functions: guidrawer.showUI()

Any component type registered in mGear (classic / EPIC / custom via MGEAR_SHIFTER_COMPONENT_PATH) can be drawn without writing extra code.

To customize the drawing process, add a preset module under guidrawer/component/. A preset is a plain module (no class required) that defines:

NAME = "my_preset"            # display name in UI
COMPONENT_TYPE = "control_01" # mGear component type to draw
ORDER = 0                     # optional, sort order in UI

def draw_guide(name, side, idx, parent_root, **opt):
    ...

See guidrawer/component/two_control_01.py for a working example.