Mel Companion: Maya Scripting for 3D Artists [With CD]

by David Stripinis

The Maya Embedded Language, or MEL, is the very foundation of the Maya application: it's what makes it so powerful. And, if you know MEL, you can make Maya work more efficiently for your own projects.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1584502754
• ISBN13: 9781584502753
• Release Date: June 2003
• Publisher: Charles River Media
• Length: 468 Pages
• Weight: 1.87 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

a great mel book....

an excellent advanceded resource......does the best job explaining UI layouts and their required nesting I have read yet. Very clear and concise. Has full file write and read chapter...file format...even outputing an html page. It is not just in the programs, but the text is very clear and to the point. Includes flow charts, ui layouts...just the whole process to make a student into a professional. Probably the most advanced tutorial is the save weights tool....it reads and writes the vertex skin weights for all influences to a file based not on id but world space locations to compensate for changes in topology.

Its very Good

I am shocked at the bad reviews this book has received. Make no mistake -> THIS ONE IS A REALLY GOOD ONE . This book is not for rank beginners in mel . Its more for someone who understands the Mel Language adequately. <br />Definetely the most advanced of books available on Mel. Beginners can take a look at Marks Book. Once you know mel reasonably well this is the book to go for. Yes few printing mistakes are there but that cant take away much from what is a nice book with some thought provoking examples. 5 stars.

An excellent place to go for intermediate MEL scripting...

This book is not for beginners. However, if you've learned the basics of MEL scripting and are looking for a good place to learn about more complex scripting techniques, this is a great place to start. I feel that this book is complementary to "MEL Scripting for Maya Animators" (which, in the interest of full disclosure, I helped write) in that it's a great book to jump into once you have a strong command of the basics.

Great Book!

After having the chance of both meeting David and looking over the book, I have to agree with my co-author Mark and say that I found it a great well rounded book about the Mel language. From some soild sections on basic computer graphics concepts with Mel all the way to some advance scripting examples. I would have loved for this book to have been out when I first started scripting Mel. Both the book and David are class acts!

An Excellent Book on Advanced MEL

Having helped write "MEL Scripting for Maya Animators," I cracked open "The MEL Companion" wondering if I was going to have my lunch eaten.What I found, to my pleasant surprise, was an interesting, well-written book that picks up with more advanced MEL examples at about the level that my book left off. "The MEL Companion" is heavy with examples... don't expect a lot of involved discussion of how MEL fits into Maya.The examples, though, are substantial, production-quality code that implement reasonably advanced techniques with comprehensive explanations of how they work and where they could be pushed farther.If you're a beginner, I suggest you get some experience with simple MEL before cracking this book open, but if you've done some scripting and want to become an expert, this is the book for you.