The Development Kit

The Maya Development Kit has been extended to support the Maya Python API. There are a number of items in the Development Kit that are required for using the Maya Python API.

Module files

There are several Python module files which contain the Maya Python API’s interfaces. These are located in the Python/site-packages directory of the installation. The Python directory in a Maya installation varies depending on the platform. For example, on Linux, this directory is at $MAYA_LOCATION/lib/python2.4/site-packages.

The modules we currently ship are:

OpenMaya.py
OpenMayaAnim.py
OpenMayaRender.py
OpenMayaFX.py
OpenMayaUI.py
OpenMayaMPx.py
OpenMayaCloth.py

Examples

Our Maya Python API examples are located in the plug-ins/scripted and the applications/scripted directory of the Development Kit.

Documentation

The Maya API and the Maya Python API share the same documentation. The documentation has been augmented to include information on Python, such as:

Methods not available in script
Methods that should be substituted in place of another
Where classes are located in the Maya Python API, for example, “(OpenMaya) (OpenMayaMPx.py)”. In this example, the second item indicates that the class is located in the OpenMayaMPx module.