I’m emmanuel katto from dubai, united arab emirates (uae) currently exploring how to use Maya’s Python API to automate the creation of more advanced rigging setups. I’m looking for some suggestions, best practices, or examples on how to efficiently automate complex rigging tasks such as creating skeletons, setting up controls, handling skinning, or even adding constraints—all through Python.
Specifically, I’m interested in:
Best practices for structuring Python scripts for rigging tasks in Maya.
Useful Maya Python commands or APIs that can streamline the creation of rigs.
Any common pitfalls or challenges I should be aware of when automating advanced rigging workflows.
How to build custom tools that can integrate with Maya’s native rigging functions.
Examples of workflows that involve scripting for control setup, joint placement, and skinning.
If you’ve worked on similar projects or have any insights into how to approach this, I’d really appreciate your input!
Get good at knowing how to query a scene efficiently. You’ll need to do things like “from this finger joint how do I find the shoulder” or “where are all the ankles controlled by IK”. This will be a mix of using cmds.ls(), cmds.listRelatives() , cmds.listHistory() – all of which have their quirks and hassles.
You’ll need to learn about namespaces. Some people love em, some people hate em (I accept them grudgingly) but if you’re doing a lot of construction in a scene, namespaces are probably your best bet for avoiding name clashes and the bugs that come with them.
When building tools, start from the bottom up. Write small single purpose scripts that do one thing reliably. Then start connecting them together into more complex operations. If you build the pieces one at a time you can be much more confident as you string them together; big monster scripts are hard to debug. Save the UI for last so you avoid the temptation of putting important code into individual buttons or sliders!
Learn to love the logging module! With logging you can print out as much debug information as could ever want, but you can hide all of that from your users by just changing the logging level. If you choose the devil’s path – using print() for debugging – you’ll fill your users listeners’ with random debug stuff that just scares them.
Speaking of debugging: find an IDE which supports proper debugging! Pycharm + MayaCharm is a good one to start with if you’re not familiar.
some IMHO’s which people might disagree with:
Start with maya.cmds. Don’t use Pymel.
Only write classes when you absolutely must.
Write everything so that future you will understand it. That means good names (no x = 11 ) and comments
There’s nothing wrong with classes per se, it’s just that a lot of times people jump head-first into classes and hierarchies in ways that make things more complex and harder to read. A lot of self taught programmers look at classes, inheritance, and syntax and think “that’s real programming!” when in fact classes are just one tool among many.
I always recommend this video (by a Python core developer) as a way to think about class usage
