Eternal W.I.P.'s Blog

Hi all!

I’m going to write down a simple step by step guide to set up PyCharm (3.1.3) with compatible versions of python (2.7) and PyQT (4.10) with Maya 2014 (Windows x64 Environment). It is quite simple but requires a couple of things that are easy to forget and this is also mainly a remainder for me in case I have to set-up another machine.

• Install python 2.7 and PyQT 4.10 for python 2.7. Both versions are the ones 100% compatible with Maya 2014.
• Link the ‘mayapy.exe’ from ‘C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin’ to a ‘python.exe’. This is so we can set PyCharm python interpreter to this path.
  • Run the command console as administrator.
  • Go to the ‘C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin’.
  • Run the command “mklink python.exe mayapy.exe”.

• Next, on PyCharm go to ‘File>Settings’ and the select ‘Project Interpreter>Python Interpreter’ on the left and set ‘C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\bin’ as Default Python Interpeter.
• Then we need to add a couple of helpers to make our lifes easier. This is totally optional but you can get the pymel auto-complete from the Maya 2014 ‘devkit’ path and helpers from PyCharm itself (see image for default paths).
• Once this is done, in order to get PyQT to work there is one last step that needs to be done. I’m not sure if this is the correct way to do it but it works for me. Last thing to do is to copy the ‘PyQt4’ folder and the ‘sip.pyd’ file from the ‘C:\Python27\Lib\site-packages’ into the following Maya folder ‘C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2014\Python\Lib\site-packages’.
• And that is it. After these simple steps your python code including PyQT should compile and run perfectly on both Maya and PyCharm.

In the following days I’ll try to post a similar step by step guide on how to Setup Visual Studio 2010 with the Maya 2014 API to write plugins. Another task that usually gets frustrating because many little things can go wrong (or simply forgetting one step) and that can get really annoying.

Until then, hope that whoever ends up reading this post finds something useful.

Jose out.