py API v2 is actually pretty robust, and it certainly is fast. It doesn't miss a lot actually, contrary to what goes around, at least in terms of what you can do with it. What it does distinctly lack is a pass of hand crafted love.
Most of it, if not its entirety, seems to be a SWIG wrapper built solely from the headers with the only tweaks being pruning what couldn't quite translate. What that results into is python that reads like crippled C++, because the API faces that kind of interface without pythonic additions, and on top of that C++ "only" features such as overloaded methods are not implemented, leaving you with more type handling than in Python than you would do in C++. pyMEL is a mix of hand crafted wrappers around different bits and bobs, and it shows, as it tries (and mostly manages) to wrap the lot in a "pythonic" way. If you are comfortable with it and can complete a task with it and read the code a week later there is no reason to not use the OM modules, it won't magically crap itself on you one day, the only real downside to it is simply that you end up writing this weird bastardized code in many cases. Some people can stomach it, personally I'd rather write in C++ right away if I'm not going to get python's advantages out of using it. That's true for the "guts" part of the client, and certainly for the DG. The DAG and scene item management side of things is generally quite painful in Maya, and while the OM modules have mostly everything, pyMEL will read better. The UI side of things you will be pretty much dealing with an only slightly smelly Qt all the time, so that's pretty good by any standard really, and probably better in Python than in C++ anyway. All in all all it is is that it's painful and could be much less so with a little additional work, not that it's not functional or too incomplete. On Thu, Jul 10, 2014 at 12:35 AM, Mike Donovan <[email protected]> wrote: > Hey Guys, > > > > I too am moving from Softimage’s Python API to Maya’s python API … its > seems pretty robust so far. Love that PySide is built in. > > > > I am wondering if you need to use PyMel … or if you can access everything > directly through an object model API with Python. I am about to convert a > lot of our tools this week. > > > > Also .. I would recommend checking out the Charcoal editor … its really > sweet and has auto-completion for much of the api. > > > > M > > > > >
