If you have been a bit confused about building graphical user interfaces (GUIs) in Maya, you are not alone. What's the difference between PySide and PyQt? Do you build GUIs by hand or with a WYSIWYG designer application? What about using Maya's UI commands? The GUI landscape in Maya has been rapidly changing for the past few years. Fortunately it seems like it is calming down, and from the turmoil we can establish best (and worst) practices for the future.

In this chapter, we will start by gaining a basic understanding of PySide's concepts, including bindings, widgets, layouts, windows, and signals. We will also learn about PySide's relationship to Qt and PyQt. Then, we will lay down some principles for building GUIs that will allow them to be decoupled from Maya and faster to develop. We will learn how to install PySide and PyQt, and write code that will run with either framework.

After that, we will create a GUI that runs outside of...