Maya 2024 pymel support and delivering an update to artists

Pipelines
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#1

Hello!
Would like to pick your mind on this recent issue we are facing
We have a Maya pipeline and toolset for our artists, made for Maya 2019-2023, and it uses pymel. Since 2024 dropped pymel install during maya installation, our toolset does not work in 2024 and beyond.

Is it our only option to go through the pipeline and remove pymel? Or maybe could we set in place some way of automatically installing pymel on our artists machines for future maya versions?

I’ve tried sharing videos and documentation on how to install Pymel for these future versions, but its too time consuming and prone to human error, I can’t go around and install on everyone’s machine the missing package

Thanks for the feedback!

#2

Autodesk dropped the option to install it in their own installer (pretty sure they had an option pre-2024), as they don’t officially support pymel and I heard rumors that Autodesk advice against pymel, however LumaPictures, the creators of pymel still seem to support their product.

According to the official git-repo and pypi, pymel supports up to Maya 2024 with pymel 1.4. So you have the option to at least support up to Maya 2024. just use pip to install it for Maya 2024, shouldn’t be that difficult and you can automate it, so artists only need to double-click on a script file.

From what I know, pymel is based on Python API 1.0 and doesn’t support Python API 2.0, so I’m a little bit concerned about long term goals, but this depends on what you are looking for and if you switch, you can take your time since Maya 2024 is still supported.

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#3

Maya PythonAPI 2.0 is no where near complete as API 1.0. And they have not really touched it for a while now.

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#4

I feel that, with upcoming maya releases, and how stuff is structured here, I might be better off finding all usages of pymel and replacing them… and in the meantime give them a script file to pip install pymel for 2014

#5

A lot depends on what you want pymel for. If you are really heavily into their helper stuff, replacement could be cumbersome. If most of what you are getting from pymel is just object oriented syntax there are alternatives out there which give you that without the overhead and the startup hitch.

#6

Is your Maya distributed in p4 or do people install it locally?
How are you distributing your tools cause you could just get pymel and get it on path (obviously you would have to add it in your startup script to handle the Maya version(s) you need to support

#7

Maya is installed locally by each artist, that’s why this problem came up anyway, and the toolset is distributed via svn currently, they just checkout to the correct folder in maya.

Is it an option to add pymel to our tools folder and load it in on startup manually depending on the version?

#8

This pymel hiccup was something we were dealing with a couple of months ago, so it might be better to just remove it entirely from our scripts

#9

You can add a folder to one of the env vars on start to point to a specific pymel folder you have in you SVN depot. You might need to make sure it is synced but it’s totally possible. I can’t recall the var off the top but it does exist.

#10

Cool! I’ll probably move forward with removing pymel so we don’t keep bumping into similar problems in the future and use this as a backup plan