Running a Specific Maya Version with mayapy?

Coding
#1

Hello! First post, long time lurker.

Perhaps I’m misunderstanding the purpose of mayapy, but I’m curious if there is a way to launch a specific version of Maya with it.

My goal is to be able to automate the process of exporting rig skinning from ngskintools, opening that up in different versions of Maya and re-applying the skinning, deleting the extra ngskintools nodes, and saving that for my animator to test. This is to overcome the skin cluster bug that happens when you go back in versions from 2018.

This post from 2014 seems to hit on it a little bit. Any other information?

Otherwise, I can always just do my rigging work in Maya 2015.

Thanks,

Ben

#2

MayaPy is bundled with every version of Maya – when you run the mayapy that comes with a particular version you’re running a headless version of that edition of maya. If you have multiple mayas, you have a mayapy for each install. So, for your problem set, you could call the 2017 version of mayapy to do something specific in that version, save out the file, and then open it in 2018. But Mayapy doesn’t have any special ability to get around version issues – it’s just Maya without a gui.

2 Likes
#3

Thank you Theodox.

I’ll make sure I run the specific mayapy found in the \bin for each version of Maya I want to work in.

For the record, I ended up creating a bat file that launches mayapy with a specific python file.

The .bat file looks like:

echo on

:: Runs a Python batch file from the Command Prompt

cd C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya2015\bin

mayapy “…\save_in_2015.py”

pause

In that python file I’m now able to put the specific commands I need.

Take care!