About Maya
Maya has become the first choice of the most productive studios and companies. It is a product of long-term research, committed to industry standards and innovation.

Here are a few reasons why Maya is so popular and why any programmer studying Multimedia should become familiar with its programming interfaces:

• Maya is a very powerful 3D modeling, animation, effects, and rendering solution, which is constantly improving.
• Maya is an open architecture and fully programmable via MEL (Maya Embedded Language) or via C++ API. This allows you to write your own executable applications with native C++ using tools like Microsoft Visual Studio or any other development environment of your choice. This way the entire Maya power is available for you in a class library and you can combine this power with any other C++ library.
• You can customize Maya or extend its functionality. Write plug-ins, new interface elements, data importers / exporters, automate tasks and a lot more as you will see during this course.
• Maya personal learning edition is available for free from: http://usa.autodesk.com/adsk/servlet/index?siteID=123112&id=7639525

MEL or C++?
If you already know C++ you may wander why there is a need to learn MEL to interface with Maya programmatically. The answer to this question is that MEL is not a subset of C++ API of Maya. MEL and C++ API are complementary. In other words, certain problems can only be solved with MEL and vice versa. It is also very common to use the combination of both by executing MEL commands from the C++ API. As a game developer, you will be required to know both.