Basic Maya Commands Explained
What Is set/get Attr
setAttr
Basically as any other language setAttr can set a value for a specified attribute of a node or any context. And it support very wide range of options. For detailed instructions please visit the official documentation from maya itself here.
Here is a very minimal example of setAttr
nodeName = "pSphere1"
cmds.setAttr("%s.tx" % nodeName, 10)getAttr Same as setAttr here it will give back the value from a specific attribute from a node. And it can return multiple types of dataTypes also. Autodesk has well documented the command here
Here is a very minimal example of getAttr
nodeName = "pSphere1"
txValue = cmds.getAttr("%s.tx" % nodeName)Basic maya command syntax
Maya commands come in a very small range of forms. Recognizing the form that a command takes is useful for working with new commands.
Simple commands
The most basic form is simply <command>(<object>) where
cmds.hide('pCube1')
cmds.delete('nurbsCurve8')Many commands can accept multiple targets. You can pass these individually or as iterables (lists, tuples)
cmds.select("top", "side")
cameras = ['top', 'side']
cmds.select(cams)You can Python’s star *args to pass an iterable object like a generator to a command:
cmds.select(*a_generator_function())A lot of commands take flags which control their behavior. for example
cmds.ls(type='mesh')will return a list of meshes, and
cmds.ls(type='nurbsCurve')returns a list of nurbs curves.
Commands which take flag can use the Python **kwargs syntax, allowing you to create dictionary of flag-value pairs and pass that to the command:
options = {type: 'mesh'}
cmds.ls(**options)is the same as
cmds.ls(type='mesh')This can be very useful when assembling a command from a list of options supplied by a user or by script logic