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

Building the request-reply automation system


Finally, we can begin putting theory into practice, and build our request-reply Maya automation system.

We'll start by learning how Python packages work, how to bootstrap Maya from another process, and how process pipes work. After that, we will set up a bare bones client and server. Once that is working, we will add support for exec and eval, exceptions, timeouts, and more.

Creating a Python package

Before writing our code, we need to create some files. Because these files are all closely related, we can put them in a folder and create a Python package.

Start by creating a mayaserver directory in your development root. For this book, that is C:\mayapybook\pylib\mayaserver. Inside, create three empty files: __init__.py, client.py, and server.py.

The __init__.py file is what turns this folder in a package. It allows us to do things like import mayaserver, which would import the __init__.py file, and import mayaserver.client and import mayaserver.server...