easier access to materials with a node

[JacquesLucke]

No description provided.

[zeffii]

here material refers to a string in this node self.material

row.prop_search(self, 'material', bpy.data, 'materials', text='', icon='MATERIAL_DATA')

if there are materials in the .blend this finds them, selecting one will assign the material name to self.material

[JacquesLucke]

oh that Looks extremly useful. I didn't know this prop_search thing
thanks :)

[zeffii]

There's plenty of nuggets like this in Sverchok, but I understand if you want to figure stuff out by yourself.

[JacquesLucke]

I will figure them out myself but if you have tips, feel free to share them :D

I dont now if you took a look at my code. Maybe you have some ideas how I can imrove my style or so.
I think you have way more experience than me :)

[zeffii]

I'll read your code base carefully, so far it looks nice and clean.

[zeffii]

but a great talk to absorb is: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OSGv2VnC0go
( Transforming Code into Beautiful, Idiomatic Python ) by Raymon Hettinger

[JacquesLucke]

Thanks for this link. Will watch this after my driving lesson :D
I often searched such videos but rarely found something really useful.
Then I bought the book 'clean code' and I like it a lot. Very helpful tips in there

[JacquesLucke]

thanks again :D pretty interesting stuff shown in this talk.

[zeffii]

Use a pep8 checker or pep-8 auto-formatter. First you will battle with it for a little, then you will see they are quite handy. What do you code in? Sublime? Vim? Gedit?

Avoid using variable names object and list, because they are builtin function names . Also they aren't helping you describe the content of the variable.

see: subheading "Avoiding dots"
Reduce the amount of dot chained lookups, especially in tight loops for speed.
This is what you do when you use aliasing too,

objects = bpy.data.objects
obj = objects['Cube']

If you can alias something once, before a tight loop that can help improve efficieny. Frequent access to objects is faster than the full path bpy.data.objects.

Aesthetically I like to push this into most things with dots. If you use bpy.props.FloatProperty 3 times, import it as from bpy.props import FloatProperty once at the top. If you need a whole collection of them do

from bpy.props import (
    FloatProperty, StringProperty, IntProperty, EnumProperty
)

yes this makes the import list a bit longer, but I defend that by saying we don't spend much time looking at the import list. But I must admit this is more style than anything, because these properties are generally only made explicit in the class body. If you have many many property definitions then you will want to import them first else you get a wall of text

[zeffii]

addendum: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DJtef410XaM (The Clean Architecture in Python : Brandon Rhodes) you will also learn a few things from Mr Rhodes.

[JacquesLucke]

I'm currently coding in Notepad++
Okay, will Keep that in mind that I shouldn't use the function names as variables. makes totally sense

Most of the time I already try to avoid dots, but you are right. I never imported FloatProperty , etc before using it.

I will Change that after the my current Project. I try to write something like another little Interpreter that generates a string that I can compile at runtime and then I want to run this on every Frame Change or so.

[zeffii]

most of bpy is a massive dict. (or behaves like a dict) . look up the .get() method for dicts, it will return a None if the key isn't present, you can also pass a fallback values .get(somekey, somefallback)

[JacquesLucke]

jep. I used this get method multiple time already.

Yeahh. it works.

[zeffii]

https://github.com/JacquesLucke/animation-nodes/blob/master/mn_cache.py#L14-L18

[JacquesLucke]

okay. your right :D
But I removed this file in my local branch.

[zeffii]

i'll fork (soon) and experiment too, there are things i'd like to try that don't make sense to implement Sverchok at this point

[JacquesLucke]

for example?

[zeffii]

various easing functions

[JacquesLucke]

okay cool

I have 360 nodes running at 20 fps. I think thats quite good