Softimage Blog

Nothing beats a popup menu for having often used funcions close to your mouse pointer.

Reinhard Claus took this to the next level for XSI users when he wrote the fabulous xPop XSI plugin. This nifty little tool allows you build your own custom popup menus in scripts, bind them to a hotkey and have them close at hand when modeling, animating, texturing or whatever it is you do during a normal day of 3D content creation or visual effects work.

The downside to xPop is that you have to feed it strings that look like this…

"cut selection;copy selection;select...[all;none;invert[selected;only components]];---;discard;go[back[1 steps;2 steps];forward];---;help"

To create something that looks like this…

That’s not so bad but when you start creating really fancy dynamic and/or context sensitive popups and you start having to deal with the numerical indices that xPop returns when the user clicks on a menu entry, you start developing a headache.

xPopMenu to the rescue

To aleviate some of these issues, because you have bigger things to worry about when working in XSI, I wrote a little class called xPopMenu that deals with all the ugliness (as little there is) for you.

Create an xPopMenu instance, add some items to it, provide callbacks for these items and call run(). Voila!

Check this code that creates the same structure you saw above. Please note that this code uses one of my stupid python tricks.

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def callback(data):
	Application.LogMessage(data)
 
mnu = xPopMenu()
mnu.addItem('Cut Selection')
mnu.addItem('Copy Selection')
sub1 = mnu.addMenu('Select...');\
	sub1.addItem('All');\
	sub1.addItem('None');\
	sub2 = sub1.addMenu('Invert');\
		sub2.addItem('Selected');\
		sub2.addItem('Only Components')
mnu.addSeparator()
mnu.addItem('Discard')
sub3 = mnu.addMenu('Go');\
	sub4 = sub3.addMenu('Back');\
		sub4.addItem('1 Step');\
		sub4.addItem('2 Steps');\
	sub3.addItem('Forward')
mnu.addSeparator()
mnu.addItem('Help', callback, 'Help')
mnu.run()

Installing

Download xPop and download xPopMenu.
Install xPop as per its installation instructions.
Put xPopMenu in your python path.
Start your scripts that use xPopMenu with:

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from xPopMenu import xPopMenu

The xPopMenu.py file includes a little bit of documentation and an example usage.
Have fun!

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This entry was posted on Sunday, May 7th, 2006 at 2:20 pm and is filed under Programming / Scripting, Python. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.