Are there any plans for writing Maya’s deadline submission script in python rather than mel?
It’s a bit of a pain to update pipeline code across two languages when Maya can be quite happy working python.
Has anyone else made a port of the submission script to python yet?
Thanks
p.

Your suggestion is a great idea. Internally we have discussed this many times, however it has always been put on hold because it is actually quite a large undertaking with little customer-facing effect. I totally agree with your sentiment though, but we aren’t planning a full rewrite of the Maya submitter in Python any time in the immediate future.

It is possible to add your own python scripts to the submitter, and hook it into our mel submitter by making a python call from mel. It could be achieved, but it’s not the ideal situation either.

• bump *
  I have some dev time coming up to look into converting the maya mel submitter into a custom python version… but thought i’d ask if thinkbox had done any work on that since these posts asked the question? Thanks!

My main argment really that would be against this, is in older versions of maya, not all the mel commands exist as python calls or you run into the problem where not all the mel flags were converted to arguments so either you need to drop support for older maya versions or keep 2 versions up to date with changes.

the other thing to watch out for is not all the render engines have python bindings, only mel

Otherwise, id be keen to help out / test if you make this a gitlab/github repo .

hey kwatts! yeah good point. actually should have mentioned before but i would probably only write a python submitter to render using vray alone as i know how large the original mel script was and all the engines it supports. don’t know if i would run into problems still with the missing mel flags though even if i stripped its support down to only vray. alternative is i try brush up on some mel scripting