Practical Maya Programming with Python

Exploring Maya and PyMEL

Now we will start digging into Maya and PyMEL. Let's begin by initializing Maya in the mayapy interpreter so we can use more than just standard Python functionality. We do this by calling maya.standalone.initialize, as shown in the following code:

>>> import maya.standalone
>>> maya.standalone.initialize()
>>> import pymel.core as pmc
>>> xform, shape = pmc.polySphere()

The import of pymel.core will implicitly call maya.standalone.initialize automatically, but I do it explicitly here so it's clear what's going on. In the future, you can generally skip the call to maya.standalone.initialize and just import pymel.core.

There is a lot we can discover about these PyMEL objects, which represent Maya nodes, using basic Python. ...