Re: [GD-General] MEL

[Jeff L. <je...@da...>]

Not a guru on either one really, but I don't find the Maya SDK any more
difficult than Max.  Some things are a little tricky since it is very object
oriented.  For example, getting the weights from an object envelope is
needlessly complicated, but that is true for Max as well.  Otherwise I would
say they pretty much do the same things and work about the same.  If you are
going to be writing rendering modules, I would much rather use the Maya SDK
but most game developers don't care about that.  I wrote a cartoon shader
for Maya a year or so ago and it was very easy.  Tried to get the thing
working in the Max SDK and it was a huge hassle.  But I am not as
experienced in the Max SDK.

In some ways I like working in the Maya SDK better.  You can dynamically
load and unload plugins in Maya which makes debugging easier.  Last time I
worked on Max that wasn't the case.  Also I really don't care for the Max
interface system but that is really just a personal preference.

No books on the Maya SDK that I am aware of but I do have a book "Mastering
Maya" or something that covers Mel pretty well.  But I think you will find
Mel is really easy to work with.  For the SDK, the online docs and sample
code is pretty much all I found I needed.


----- Original Message -----
From: "Tom Spilman" <tsp...@mo...>
To: "Gamedev General List" <Gam...@li...>
Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 10:34 AM
Subject: Re: [GD-General] MEL


> > How tough is it to learn MEL? I am coming from Max Plug-In SDK.
>
>     Well they're two different things...
>
>     MEL is Maya's scripting language and is more akin to MaxScript than
> Max's plug-in API.  Unfortunately the best source of information on MEL
i've
> found is the command documentation ( goto the 'Help' menu then 'MEL
Command
> Reference...' ) and reading other MEL scripts.  MEL is great for quick and
> dirty tasks, but it's very hard to debug so don't write anything too big
> with it.
>
>     Now Maya also has a C++ plug-in API and from what i've been told it
can
> be a bitch to work with.  You can find info on the API in the
> \Maya4.0\docs\en_us\html\DevKit folder of your Maya install.
>
> > How do you think is the fastest way for me to ramp up to MEL from Max
> > plug-in?
>
>     There is far more info available on Max plug-in and script writing
than
> for Maya, so you'll have to settle for the 'just do it' approach to learn
> how it works.  Tom
>
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Corrinne Yu" <cor...@sp...>
> To: <gam...@li...>
> Sent: Wednesday, May 08, 2002 11:47 AM
> Subject: [GD-General] MEL
>
>
> > How tough is it to learn MEL? I am coming from Max Plug-In SDK.
> > What kind of Maya export mangling should I be careful of?
> >
> > My artists are moving more to Maya, and the data we need for engine is
> > increasingly those from Maya than Max.
> >
> > How do you think is the fastest way for me to ramp up to MEL from Max
> > plug-in?
> >
> > Thanks for the heads up.
> >
> >
> >
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