Does anyone know where I could find a tutorial or some kind of documentation on how to interact with Maya using outside means. Such as using a web page to control a character/scene or better yet having a local java GUI that can push and pull data from Maya.
anything would help.
Thanks!
The maya command port accepts communications over TCP/IP; if you google ‘maya python commandPort’ you’ll get a bunch of options. Anything that can send text over TCP can do it. The incoming text can be treated as if it were mel entered on the command line – or you can create a proc and have it handle the text that comes in for you using ‘commandPort(pre=your_command_here)’
The more modern way is to use a remote process module like RPyc or 0mq, as discussed here and here
We’re doing:
Maya <-> Python <-> Python.net(CLR) <-> WCF over SOAP/HTTP <-> Other WCF .NET Applications
This is not for the faint of heart, and is best debugged with runes, tea leaves, and coding during a new moon. Also, it requires that you explicitly expose the data and methods you want to use externally.
Sane men will follow Theodox’s suggestions.
We did the same route at Bungie, using Max and .Net . It was bad mostly because the folks in Max land (= me) and the folks who wrote the ‘other applications’ didn’t work closely enough together (or do enough documenting!) so that changes on either end caused problems. If I had to do it all over again I’d unit-test the crap out everything that went over the wire so neither side could give the other unpleasant suprises. I’d also invest time upfront in a good standard (shared) library of data types that both ends had so there was no crazy marshalling on either end.
Yeah, I’m busy right now moving all the functionality into a single assembly that is shared by all the separate apps and which stubs out all the methods and interfaces. The actual functionality will be provided/overridden by the actual apps. I’m hoping this will make things easier. It’s taken me far too long to wrap my head around it…
We’re using a wsgi server inside of maya with specific urls set up. I had originally thought to use the command port as it’s built in and all, but one cool thing we can do is have a webserver that can respond to the users IP with an http request to interact with maya. It’s one more moving part, but it’s a small one. And debugging is pretty easy if you handle all of the requests properly. After reading theodox and btribble, i’m gonna document the crap out of it on monday 