Joint Orient UI using qt designer and maya elements One of the
nice things in Maya is being able to make interfaces for tool
using Qt and Qt Designer. Unfortunately not everything in Qt has
a corresponding UI element in maya, even for some things that
you think there would be. One most glaring omissions is that a
Qt float spinbox doesn't get mapped to a maya float field.
While recreating the Comet Joint Orient tool over to python I
ran into this issue while trying to replicate the world up and
tweak vector fields. If you just want to get the value from a
float spinbox you can by routing its information into something
maya does know how to talk to, usually a line edit, using Qt
signals/slots mechanism. However the comet version of the tool
has buttons that set the field to a given preset vector and I
couldn't get away with only reading the values. The obvious
solution to that is to try creating float fields in maya and add
them to the Qt interface.  In order to add new elements to the
interface we need to kno