In the last of this short series about my Maya Utilities code, I want to look at how it all comes together, how I use it on a daily basis, and share the code with you. more

The last module in my current Maya Utils collection, files.py, deals with files and projects, and shows off a slightly more complex button.

This time, I want to have a look at two simple submodules for the Maya Utilities framework I described in my previous post.

Obviously, I can’t use something like Maya for even a week, without starting to write myself little scripts and tools. Python and PyMEL help, although not always. The Maya API is sometimes really discouraging, but nevertheless, I set up a little framework for myself, to collect (and slightly organise) small scripts in Maya. Nothing fancy, but that’s the goal: simple little scripts, at your fingertips.

Would you believe it, people actually read this??? Anyway, even more amazing: thanks to Guy Dubost, I’ve now learned that there actually is a straight-forward way of doing this in MEL: about -batch. As with so many things (undoInfo, anyone?) Maya really knows how to hide it’s functionality in the most obscure places/commands. Thank you Guy, for mailing me this hint!

Q: How do you check, whether Maya is running in batch mode, using MEL?

So I might have been a bit too eager yesterday. Threading does work, just not the way I was trying to do it.

Today I finally got to play with Maya 2011 at work. Since most of our pipeline is built on Python and Qt (via PyQt), my first interest after the improved apparel of the UI, was how much PyQt goodness we could get out of this new version.