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pythoncmdmayamel

It is possible to use the CMD to send commands in the active Maya window?

I am a beginner in Maya, and I wanted to run commands in a cmd in the active window of maya to modify things in the scene, like put a sphere for example, be in python

from pymel.all import *
sphere()

or MEL

polySphere -r 1 -sx 20 -sy 20 -ax 0 1 0 -cuv 2 -ch 1;

I found the mayapi, and I found several content related to "headless" (without the GUI), but I found nothing to run in the open window yet, maybe because I don't know the terms very much. I would like it to be in python, but if you know any solution in MEL you can put it here too!

Is there any way to do this without specifying the open document path?

Solution

  • You have four basic options for programmatic control of maya.

    1. Running scripts inside the script editor in Maya. This requires that you have an open GUI maya instance running and you'd either type the commands yourself, or initiate scripts by loading and executing them in the script editor. This works fine for automating repetitive tasks but requires manual intervention on your part.

    2. You can send individual commands to Maya over a TCP connection using the maya command port This is basically like connecting to another computer over telnet: you can control the Maya sessions but you'll be communicating entirely via text. It's commonly used, for example, by people who are writing scripts in Sublime Text to test them out in Maya without switching windows

    3. You can run a commandline-only copy of Maya using the MayaPy python interpreter that ships with Maya and the maya.standalone module, which hosts a non-GUI maya session. That lets you excute python commands in a Maya without needing the GUI at all -- it's a common tool for automation tasks.

    4. You can pass a script argument to Maya at startup with the '-c' (for "command") flag. Maya will open and run that script. For legacy reasons the commands are only MEL, not python, but you can get around that by using the MEL command "python" along with a Python command in quotes.

    All of these are useful, the right one really depends on what you need to do. For long running tasks however #3 is probably the most reliable method because it's easy to iterate on and test.