Thursday, January 24, 2013

Maya's Programming Interface

There have four different programming interfaces to interact with Maya, using three different programming languages. The flowing picture illustrates how these interfaces interact with Maya.


Maya Embedded Language (MEL): MEL scripts fundamentally define and create the Maya GUI. MEL is relatively easy to create, edit and execute, but it is also only used in Maya and has a variety of technical limitations. Namely, MEL has no support for object-oriented programming. MEL can only communicate with Maya through a defined set of interfaces in the Command Engine (or by calling Python).

Python: It can execute the same Maya commands as MEL using Maya's Command Engine. However, Python is also more robust than MEL because it is an object-oriented language.Moreover, Python has an extensive library of built-in features as well as a large community outside of Maya users.

C++ Application Programming Interface: The Maya C++ API is the most flexible way to add features to Maya. However, because of its compilation requirements, the c++ API cannot be used interactively with the Maya user interface. so it can be tedious to test even small bits of code. C++ also has a much steeper learning curve than MEL or Python.


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