The Command Line

If you use Maya for a particular job - such as modeling, rigging, or texturing - there may be tools that are essential in your workflow.  

In the same way, there are 3 Maya tools/features that we should and will become acquainted with most commonly used for MEL script creation

• the Command Line 
• the Command Feedback Line
  
• the Script Editor 

Today, we'll simply introduce the Command Line and the Command Feedback Line, to start. 

The Command Line

The Command Line is a simple place to insert your MEL commands.  Although we don't know how to write commands yet, we'll soon fix that.

The Command Feedback Line 
The Command Feedback Line is a complimentary component to the Command Line and Its job is to -*drum-roll, please* - give feedback about results from a command.  

Even if you've never used the Command Line before, you may have noticed that the Command Feedback Line will show some text from time to time, especially when you do major tasks like creating an object or deleting one. 

Before we go on and write scripts, though, lets find the Command Line and The Command Feedback Line.

Accessing the Command Line
If the layout of your Maya settings is in the default mode, you’ll notice at the bottom a piece of text that actually says, “MEL”; immediately to the right is a white text box.  This white text box is the Command Line. The Command Feedback Line is the dark gray box immediately to the right of the Command Line (see Figure 1). 

Figure 1: Command Line

If for some reason you don’t see the Command Line on your screen, simply go to (see Figure 2):

• Display > UI Elements > Command Line 

Figure 2 : Accessing Command Line

Using the Command Line
We don’t know any MEL commands yet...let’s change that.

Click inside the Command Line.

Type sphere

Press Enter

Figure 3: Nurb Sphere

Awesome!

A nurbs sphere (should have) just popped up out of nowhere. (see Figure 3)

By typing sphere in the Command Line, Maya recognized the command and executed it by creating an actual nurbs sphere into the scene.

The actual sphere is not what's important, though; what's important is you just entered a MEL command and Maya obeyed.  Not to mention, this shows powerful nature of MEL.

Not convinced? Imagine, for some reason, you wanted 50,000 copies of the same sphere.

The only way to do that would be to select the sphere and duplicate 50,000 times by hand, right? Wrong. MEL could automate a duplication 50 million times with ease and practically in an instant.

That's powerful stuff!

Next Post:

In the next few blog posts, we’ll touch on what keeps Maya from doing a command due to the two most common types of errors.

• improper commands
• syntax errors