New to maya Api

[noto]

All interesting points Joojaa, however I feel they are global/generic in nature, applicable in most program development scenarios and as such they don't afford anything particular about Maya's API quirks/Modus Operandi. Statements like Rob's "If you are using MPxCommand, you're doing it wrong" are the kind of veteran Maya API knowledge I'm thinking about. What sort of Maya API maxims do you hold that may not be immeditate apparent? Things similar to "request data from a node's own plugs only, never from others in the DG (to prevent going against native DG evaluation)".

Many thanks!

[rob-bateman]

QUOTE(noto @ 04/05/09, 04:22 PM) [snapback]305042[/snapback]
What sort of Maya API maxims do you hold that may not be immeditate apparent?

See the thread that started this thread......

http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=242667

plus this:

http://www.highend3d.com/boards/index.php?showtopic=242681

plus this to understand how the data is laid out:

http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/...earch/index.htm

There are more gotchas than there are maxims imho. The exporter factfile will cover quite a few of the common gotchas. The rest comes down to software design. Whenever you need to do X, you'll need to plan it first (and you might want to post your plans for your first couple of plug-ins here so that we can point out a flaw or two). Don't be upset if we tell you to do portions of it in mel

QUOTE
- Do you believe the Alias/Autodesk dev kit examples are good illustrations of sound API useage? (you'd hope so..., but you never know who is writing the docs and their relationship with dev).

For the most part, however there are a couple of examples that aren't perfect, or are using older parts of the API that aren't that important anymore. (i.e. writing shaders for maya's renderer rather than using mental ray). The code itself is OK, however it's pretty trivial to write your own wrappers in the API that simplify the tasks further. I'd love to publish my wrappers, however there are small NDA problems in the way. tbh, after writing a few custom nodes in the API, you'll notice some very repetitive tasks that you'll be able to wrap, and you'll have some plug-ins to test.

QUOTE
- If you were starting out again, what would you have wished you knew? (there is a nice quote by someone along the lines of: 'if you knew you were going to have amnesia next week, what would you write now in three paragraphs to best capture the knowledge you'd want to pass on to yourself learning from scratch' ...if you could do this for explicit amnesia of your API knowledge?

A link to my website

[noto]

Superb, thank you both very much.

[joojaa]

Well if you want maya specific. Then it would be learn mel first, then stare at your problem form mels point of view for a period of atleast 3 weeks before touching the api.