Howdy, I've been getting familiar with PyMel over the past few months, and have found it a treat to work with.
As far as support - I suppose you can't give your R&D team the comfort that a full-fledged support contract might provide, but I can say from (recent) personal experience that Chad from Luma is awesome about answering questions on the CGTalk forums and at this group. In fact, I just posted a problem I was having a couple days ago and within a day or so Chad looked at my code and helped me diagnose the problem. Also, lets say you start writing tools for Maya 09 with the current PyMel version (0.9.2). If there's something that you discover in this release that doesn't work properly, you can always code around with with good ol' maya.cmds. After writing your tools, you don't *need* to upgrade if new PyMel versions are released until some new feature in Maya 2011 or whatever forces an upgrade. And at the point where the studio upgrades Maya, I would assume there would be some extensive testing before rolling it out anyways. I would also assume an upgrade wouldn't take place in the middle of a fast-paced production, so hopefully you'll have time to solve any issues that may arise. >From a cost/benefit standpoint I think that PyMel is a big winner - because it costs nothing! I've been able to develop probably 30% faster using PyMel than without it. Now I have to qualify my comments by saying that I'm currently a student at Gnomon, so I haven't coded in production :) That being said, I did work as a IT/systems auditor for PricewaterhouseCoopers before jumping into CG, so I have some understanding of the risk analysis that you're going through. Anyways, hope this is some help, or at least gives you something to think about. Good luck! -JP On Dec 11, 8:47 am, daganael <[email protected]> wrote: > Hi, > > First, sorry for those who may have read this allready somwhere else, > as we posted in several places. > > So, we are a rigging team, here at Mac Guff Ligne, and we are moving > forward to add Pyhton to our rigging toolSet (finaly!). > Even if we are beginner in Python, we understand the benefits of it > (its object oriented nature, the vast amount of available libraries, > large community, etc...), and we know that the standard implementation > of it in maya should/could have been much more deep and powerful, as > Pymel seems to prove. > We read a lot about it everywhere, and it seems that pymel is a very > powerful example of what the implementation could have been, both on > object and api sides. > > We are truly enthousiasts about using pymel but our R&D department is > almost against the use of pymel. > > Their arguments are: > > - Probable issues and the support it might need. > - As this projet doesn't belong to Autodesk si it may stop at any > time. > - Major changes in pymel future versions may occur and obsolete large > portions of our code > - As it's another layer of code, it brings its own bugs. > - OpenSource > > Our arguments are (based on various readings over the net): > - The ObjectOriented implementation rocks. > - Smaller and clearer code, thus faster development. > - Smarter Api integration. > - OpenSource (^^) > > So at last, we decide to turn to the community in order to gather the > maximum pros and cons. > We'll be glad to hear from everyone (Pymel developpers opinion, of > course, is a must), for any advice, known issues, problem with support/ > continuity, knowledge and experience you have and of course everything > you can think about it! > > Thank's for the time you may spend to reply. > > - MglRigTeam - -- http://groups.google.com/group/python_inside_maya
