Hello World! : Blog Introduction

Why learn MEL?

If you're a regular Maya user, you may have often found yourself doing the same monotonous commands multiple times.  

Have you ever wondered, “There has to be a better way to do 'this' or automate 'that'.”

There is: MEL.

I’ve probably wasted weeks of my life already by not utilizing MEL and its time-saving capabilities. I hope that you won’t have to endure the same loss that I have anymore. At the very least, you’ll be armed with knowledge you didn’t have before – and that knowledge can help you create great work.

What is MEL?

MEL is actually an acronym for Maya Embedded Language and is the scripting language that makes Maya tick.  

The heart of Maya is MEL – everything you do in Maya is actually attributed to a MEL command. In fact, you're running a MEL command when you:

• save your work
• create a piece of geometry
• animating that arm from point A to point B
• pretty much anything you do in Maya

Unless you’ve already worked in MEL, chances are you’ve been using MEL in the background and just didn’t know it.

"Maya already has what I need."

Does it? 
You’d be surprised how many of the default Maya tools could be improved upon, at the very least.  You can also create custom tools that don’t even exist, which could automate many time-consuming tasks.

I once heard a colleague say aloud, “Whenever I save, I always have to delete my history and freeze my transformations…I wish I didn’t have to all of that all the time.”  

My colleague was right. It takes about 7 seconds to go through the menus to do all of that.  

When you’re in the “zone”, it can be a real interruption to the workflow and incredibly inefficient.  In fact, my colleague wastes over 3.5 minutes when performs this “simple” ritual of saving his work 30 times.

What if he just clicked a button that did all of that?  What if Maya did it automatically?

You can easily create a customized MEL command to do such a thing – and so much more. 

Why NOT learn MEL?

I’ve found that some of my colleagues never touch the MEL feature because they:

• are afraid it’ll take too long to learn
• don’t know how to use it
• are afraid they’ll break Maya
• feel it doesn’t concern them
• have no idea what it is

“Playing with MEL is for the computer scientists and programmers”, a friend said.

I submit that MEL can be for anyone and everyone who uses Maya. 

In fact, MEL can be used to:

• create custom tools 
• automate complex procedures
• automate repetitive procedures 
• speed up your process exponentially

As a result, you can spend more of your time being more creative and efficient in Maya.

Bottom line: there is no reason not to learn MEL.

So this blog is about MEL?

In a word, yes.

The purpose of this blog is to get the non-programmer Maya user acquainted with MEL.  The topics covered will specifically cover MEL scripting, but the concepts can transcend into other programming languages, as well.  Maybe you’ve done some computer science before, but it just never clicked.  GREAT!! Or perhaps you’ve never written a computer script in your life. AWESOME!!

Using MEL is incredibly easy and since Maya is such a graphic program, it can really concretize the abstract nature of programming.

For the non-believer, MEL may seem daunting at first, but it really doesn’t have to be. In fact, you’ve already done the hard part if you’re a fair user of Maya.  Taking the first step to learning something brand new is always the hardest part, but together, we can see how painless learning MEL can be.

By the end, you’ll realize you’ve been missing out on something powerful, important, and EASY. Who knows, maybe you have a knack for it , but just didn’t know it; maybe you’ll be the next great Technical Director!

So let's get started!