About The Maya devkit

The Maya SDK, commonly known as the Maya devkit or simply "the devkit", allows you to extend Maya's capabilities by creating plug-ins for Maya, and standalone applications that use the Maya libraries.

Maya plug-ins are loaded into Maya. They add functionality to Maya either as commands or nodes. A MEL script packaged with your command plug-ins adds a menu item or other interface for accessing the command. Example plug-ins can be found in the devkit/plug-ins directory.

Maya standalone applications run independently outside of a running Maya installation, but use the Maya API and framework. Applications can be used to operate on objects in a Maya scene file, for example. Example applications can be found in the devkit/applications directory.

The devkit is available from the The Maya Developer Center. It contains C++, Python, and .NET APIs.

Two versions of the Python API are included in the devkit. Python API 1.0 is a version of the C++ API that has been converted to Python, while Python API 2.0 is a port of the API to Python. Python API 2.0 is more pythonic than API 1.0 and contains Python-specific features.