Tutorials - CG

MEL for Beginners

Before we start to explore the world of MEL, we have to know some important things about MEL.

What is MEL?
First you don't HAVE TO know MEL in order to work with maya. MEL is not a feature in maya! maya IS BUILD UPON MEL. Remember! It's different! This means that ANYTHING you do, is a MEL script in maya! So by knowing this now you understand why knowing MEL will make you more powerful than other people who just know maya!

So what MEL can do for me?
Well MEL can do ANYTHING you can think of. You can even model with MEL! But you don't wanna do that! Because Alias (now is under Autodesk!) already has made some pretty good modeling tools (with MEL) for you.

So you might think: "Then why should I spend time to learn MEL?"

I'll answer your question with a list that will show you what is MEL good for:
1- To make your new tools that maya does not have!
2- In special effects and visual effects that has particles
3- If you learn MEL, you will understand maya better and you can debug your scene if you have one!
...

To just make it more clear about the MEL in animation field think of the famous "Falling-Alphabets" in "The Matrix". To make that by hand it would take months! Because everything in there is random. But in one day you can make something like that with MEL!

In the next MEL tutorial, I'll show you some simple MEL commands that you can practice with.