A boilerplate for creating PyQt4/PySide and PyQt5/PySide2 applications running in Maya, Nuke, Blender, 3DS Max, Houdini, Unreal Engine or completely standalone.

• The entire boilerplate was re-written so it could be packaged and distributed with PyPi.
• Adding Blender, 3DS Max, Houdini, and Unreal Engine support.

For details, see CHANGELOG.md.

• Does not work with Nuke 10.0v1 on OS X: #7
• Maya palette glitchy in standalone mode with PySide/PyQt4 on OS X (disabled by default): #9
• Window will not stay on top of Nuke (OS X) without Qt.Tool or Qt.WindowStaysOnTopHint: #12

Easy way:

pip install pyvfx-boilerplate

Long way:

git clone https://github.com/fredrikaverpil/pyvfx-boilerplate.git
cd pyvfx-boilerplate
python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
pip install dist/*

Pip installs a program named pyvfx-boilerplate as an example Run as standalone: (you may need to additionally install PyQt4, PyQt5, PySide or PySide2 for standalone to work depending on your system configuration)

pyvfx-boilerplate

Run in script editor of Maya or Nuke:

import sys
sys.path.append('/path/to/pyvfx-boilerplate')
from pyvfx_boilerplate import boilerplate_ui
bpr = boilerplate_ui.BoilerplateRunner()
bpr.run_main()

• See inheritance example above

Since the boilerplate relies on Qt.py, you should design your application as if you were designing it for PyQt5/PySide2. This means creating widgets using QtWidgets rather than QtGui. The Qt.py module takes care of the remapping and makes for compatibility with PyQt4/PySide. Read more over at the Qt.py repository.

Tip: when you cannot rely on Qt.py, create an issue (probably over at Qt.py) and/or detect which binding is being used and write some custom code:

from Qt import QtCompat

if QtCompat.__binding__ in ('PyQt4', 'PySide'):
    # Do something if PyQt4 or PySide is used

if QtCompat__binding.startswith('PySide'):
    # Do something if PySide or PySide2 is used

if QtCompat__binding == 'PySide2':
    # Do something if PySide2 is used

Something wrong, have a question or wish to file a feature request?

Open up an issue here!

If you wish to contribute, pull requests are more than welcome!