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By David Stripinis
The Maya Embedded Language, or MEL, is the very starting place of the Maya software: it truly is what makes it so robust. And, in the event you be aware of MEL, you may make Maya paintings extra successfully to your personal initiatives. no matter if customizing the workspace, editing the instruments that exist already, or growing new instruments, an artist versed in MEL is able to take advantage of the real energy of Maya. the matter is that MEL could be very intimidating to artists and different non-programmers. To an artist, MEL represents an entire different international choked with phrases like variable, conditional statements, and vector cross-product. like every different programming language, MEL has its personal vocabulary and ideas of grammar. To grasp it, you just have to study the foundations: you do not have to turn into a programmer. The MEL better half is helping artists do that. within the first a part of the booklet, you are going to find out about the syntax, vocabulary, and constitution of MELВ-its grammar. you will research a few simple math techniques, resembling different types of numbers and straightforward math equations, and on the finish of half one you are going to discover innovations for development and developing courses. the second one half covers the development of scripts that aspect a number of the methods you should use MEL. you are going to know about expressions, primitive gadgets, lighting fixtures and rendering, instrument production, interface customization, and interpreting and writing records out and in of Maya. The MEL better half was once written by way of an artist for artists. To get the main out of this publication, you'll have a basic wisdom of operating in 3D and the Maya application. moreover, even supposing chances are you'll no longer have an intensive wisdom and figuring out of arithmetic, you will have a few willingness to profit the fundamentals of operating with numbers. except that, every thing else is defined in language that's optimistically as transparent because it is unique.
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Additional info for The MEL Companion: Maya Scripting for 3D Artists
Example text
The first is to split off sections of code that constitute a complete action and place these functions in the same script file, being sure to place them before the global procedure and before any other functions that need to make call to that function. The second choice is to convert these into their own individual global procedures. For very specific actions, this is not a good choice, as it simply adds to the memory footprint of a script’s components and adds complication to maintaining a tool.
While that might sound ridiculous, we should remember that Albert Einstein was a clerk in the patent office before going on to discover that whole Theory of Relativity thing. Another great source for effective math and physics routines to solve our computer graphics problems are the proceedings from the AMC SIGGRAPH and the Game Developers Conferences. More and more, the papers at these conferences serve as simple abstracts to protect the intellectual property of the studios or software developers who originated the research, but many universities still publish extensive treatises on advanced concepts.
The resulting number is the vector’s magnitude, assuming that the vector begins at the origin. This is a simple way to find an object’s distance from the origin or, by simply finding the resultant vector of subtracting two vectors, the distance of two objects from each other. Of course, we can use a vector equation to find the vector length, but as with many things in Maya, the problem has multiple solutions. Statements A statement is how we set or compare data within MEL. The simplest of all statements, the assignment statement, we have already seen used during the declaration of variables.