Making pop up UIs in Houdini

[TomRaynor]

Hi guys,

Does Houdini come with any way of making reasonably sophisticated/complex UIs that are more advanced than just a simple "hou.ui.displaymessage()"?

Lets say I want to click a shelf button and get a pop up window that allows me to enter a few strings, choose from a couple of drop down menus and tick a couple of checkboxes.

I want to use the results of whatever the user picks to run some more code.

Is this kind of thing possible? I can't find anywhere in the "hou" reference that shows this can be done...

Thanks

[TomRaynor]

So far I have found a few things like:

hou.ui.readMultiInput("This is a message", ["test1", "test2"])

&

hou.ui.selectFromList(["1","2","3"])

But it doesn't seem like you can combine them and it seems a bit limited in the types of ui elements available.

Is PyQT the only way?

[graham]

If you can get your head around Houdini's .ui script you can make some not too complex dialogs with the look and feel of Houdini. It's a bit weird though and not super full featured.

I'd say PyQt is probably the best bet.

[edward]

I'm partial to the .ui scripting language though. It's basically like a cleaner version of Mozilla's XUL. To use it, you need to create a dialog.ui file and give it the full path to hou.ui.createDialog(). This creates a hou.Dialog object that you can then do stuff with.

Unfortunately, there's no documentation for it though. The closest is the HDK documentation:

http://www.sidefx.co...k_uinative.html

http://www.sidefx.co...e_uiscript.html

http://www.sidefx.com/docs/hdk12.5/cmd__ui_8_c.html

http://www.sidefx.co...8_c_source.html

[fxrod]

My vote is PyQT, too.