I really needed this...

This module exists to unify and pythonify the various commands and apis necessary to manipulate Maya's 3D Viewports. These include, hardwareRenderGlobal attributes, modelPanel and modelEditor commands, as well as some key features of OpenMayaUI's M3dView class.

from mvp import Viewport

view = Viewport.active()
view.camera = 'top'
view.background = 0.5, 0.5, 0.5
view.nurbsCurves = False

• Unified api for manipulating Maya Viewports
• Get or set viewport state (all attributes). Making it easy to restore a Viewport to a previous configuration.
• Easily set focus and playblast Viewports. Much more consistent than using active view.
• Draw text in Viewports using QLabels.
• Show identifiers in viewports, making it easy to grab the correct viewport at a glance.

MVP is available through the python package index as mvp.

pip install mvp

git clone git@github.com/danbradham/mvp.git
cd mvp
python setup.py install

For more information visit the docs.