Definitely familiarize yourself with the subprocess Python module. The trick to running processes invisibly and “asynchronously” lies in the ability to generate background child processes of Maya. (As far as I’m aware it’s impossible to execute any maya.cmds commands from another thread.) You’ll quickly find yourself crashing Maya and getting all sorts of horrible print outs in the console log. I’ve not had a ton of luck with multithreading in Maya. The concept of allowing artists to continue working even while a tool is processing has been a guiding principal behind much of my Maya tool development.
