interaction maya and external program

[Anonymous]

Hello, I am a Maya-user and a .Net programmer. I would like to know if there is a way to communicate between an external programme (mine) and maya. For instance I would like to fetch the current frame(number) in rendersequence and display or use that number in my own programme, so that I can monitor the renderprogress outside of maya. This because when my machine is rendering a large number of frames, the maya interface is inaccessible.

Thanks for any suggestion.

I use Maya 2020.2 en MS Visual Basic.net 2020 .

[bradley_henke]

In my mind, the most straight forward way of doing this would be to create a new plugin, and during the plugin initialization register callbacks with the specific MMessage that you're interested in monitoring.

For example, you could use MEventMessage to trigger a function call during the "timeChanged" event. That function call could then communicate with your external program. 

You would probably be looking at some sort of client / server model with your external program being the server which accepts these events from the maya which acts like a client. This connection could also be established during the plugin initialization. 

[bradley_henke]

I think it's also possible to communicate the other direction as well (external program -> maya) using MUserEventMessage. The same setup is involved, namely, creating the client / server connection during the plugin initialization. Then you could post events to maya, and have maya execute a command whenever the event is received.