Book Image

Practical Maya Programming with Python

By : Robert Galanakis
Book Image

Practical Maya Programming with Python

By: Robert Galanakis

Overview of this book

Table of Contents (17 chapters)
Practical Maya Programming with Python
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Understanding Dependency Graph plugins


The Maya API Guide's Python Learning Path help document covers the basics of creating dependency graph plugins, which are also called node plugins for short. You can get quite far by cargo culting (copy, pasting, and adjusting) examples without knowing why something is done. Even if most of the explanations are in the Maya help documents somewhere, it can be difficult to find and put it all together. So in this section, we'll create a dependency graph plugin and explain each new topic along the way, making sure some old ones are understood as well.

Note

The term cargo cult programming refers to when a programmer uses some code without understand why or how it does what it does. It originates from the practice some Pacific tribes adopted after World War II, where they would make mock-ups of airplanes and landing strips with the hope of bringing back the cargo planes that visited them during the war.

A node plugin is a plugin type that inherits from the...