Your beloved Softimage scripting experience won't be coming back. It's not all downsides, but Maya just works very differently. In some cases it's superior, in some cases it's even more pleasant to deal with (Qt), and in some others it's so dreadful you'll just be better off using the C++ API even if performance wasn't a concern.
In Soft, for better or for worse, the entire API was passing COM objects around towards the scripting side of things. On Top of that, the general layout of the application, the scene, and the various accessors lent itself very well to Pythonic styles. In Maya you do have several options. You can import mel commands, which is largely a legacy thing but some times still needed, which was the first implementation offered back then. It's OK if you miss something somewhere (there are some dark corners of Maya where only MEL can go still, places where innocence dies) and have to absolutely get there, or have to quickly convert some MEL script to Python with little time to do it. You have pymel, which was originally a private initiative by some VFX shops (tempted to say Luma started it originally), which is a wrap that's intended to "feel" pythonic in how it divides and offers modules, and does a decent enough job of it, this was later bought and offered by Autodesk. It's not bad for pipeline-y scripts actually, but performance can swing a lot. And lastly you have OpenMaya, which I think gets referred to as the Python API these days, which is now up to v2. OpenMaya is a 1:1 binding of the C++ API, which IMO is by far the strongest and better engineered of various things in Maya. The good news is that that makes it relatively fast and gives it access to a considerable extent of Maya's guts. The bad news is that the wrapper being a largely automated job derived from headers it has limitations and requires you constantly deal with very, very type specific methods and constructors, which usually leads to Python code that vastly surpasses the line count of the same in C++, not to mention is simply not meant to be written or read like that. In some cases it gets to the point where I don't even bother doing proto work in Python, and just straight away pick up a template and start writing a step further than that in C++, because it's just too damn noodly to have any of the benefits of doing a sketch. Lastly, you have pyQt (or pySide, the distinction as a user is almost academic), which is the framework a great deal of Maya's UI work and a handful of other things, and that works quite well at several different levels of depth. On that I agree with Luc-Eric. I also agree with Luc-Eric on the availability of more and better examples, especially in the advanced topics, but there's also a lot more crud to sift through. All in all though it's rare I can't find at all what I need if I look for it hard enough. Hopefully that clears it up in terms of what the options are. As for what your scripting experience will be, you have to bear in mind Maya and XSI do things very, very differently. I have a deep dislike for the mantra "all software are the same it's just a matter of finding what the button is named". It's total and utter bullshit if you do anything more than pushing buttons :p Some things are better in one app, some in the other, but in general be ready to write A LOT more code when it comes to Maya. It has a very... "diverse" approach to many things, often scattered and specialized in inscrutable ways. Some things that are trivialities or have obvious feedback when operated in XSI will have crawling over walls and spewing like the child from the Exorcist movie. There are good days when I don't have to roam in the dark areas, and writing/porting some nodes is an enjoyable experience. Other days I have to call IT for a new monitor. On Wed, May 7, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Leendert A. Hartog <hirazib...@live.nl>wrote: > See what you did there? You confused me needlessly. ;) > From all of this I gather there is an original Python implementation, > PyMEL and Maya Python 2.0. > And some comments seem to imply none of them are any good... > So where to actually start, if this is more of less true? > What comes closest to our "beloved" Softimage Python scripting experience? > > > Greetz > Leendert > > -- > > Leendert A. Hartog AKA Hirazi Blue > Administrator NOT the owner of si-community.com > > -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are!
