How do you work on plug-Ins for Maya?

Hi All,

I’d like to know how you set up your work environment for coding plug-ins for Maya?

Right now, I am working on a final project for a two year course: A plug-in for Maya, which I want to have auto-organising naming and export of animations for games.

I am using Visual Studio Code, with a MEL language extension, plus the Python extension.

Until now, I have mostly coded in C# for Unity. So I am finding this 80s-sytle lack of integration and feedback from the coding environment really… testing.

I’m using a lot of OpenMaya, no auto-completion, no basic error highlighting. I have to open Maya (just unticking and reticking Loaded doesn’t seem enough), and run my scripts every time I want to check a line or a function.

Can anyone recommend further/other plug-ins, or ways to get feedback? Or just methodologies you use to make this process less like trying to milk a stone!

Raffaele did a great tutorial…

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Maya’s C++ API (while a little harder to get started and understand) is quite easy especially if you’ve been using OpenMaya, I’ve used:

http://www.chadvernon.com/blog/resources/maya-api-programming/your-first-plug-in/

http://docs.autodesk.com/MAYAUL/2014/ENU/Maya-API-Documentation/index.html

And had an easy time converting usual plugin in logic.

Compared to a lot of other SDK’s / API Maya is one of the better one’s I’ve used, for both the API documentation and resources along with the ablitity to call mel and pythong directly with the API if you ever needed to. The only huge issues I’ve had was integrating Qt with it.