New series of mini-tutorials at www.melscripting.com
 

I'm starting a new series of mini-tutorials at www.melscripting.com to discuss topics of interest in MEL. These will be focused and short discussions that go beyond the coverage in MEL Scripting for Maya Animators.

I hope they're useful! The first one, posted this morning, is entitled Local and Global Procedures.

-- Mark

Sounds very good Mark.
I´ll be sure to keep an eye out on that page.

BTW, any suggestions for future mini-tutorials? Scope should be a page or two, and preferably not covered in MEL Scripting for Maya Animators.

-- Mark

Hey Mark, this mini-tutorial idea is really cool...but looking at the index of your book, it'll be very hard to pick something for the tutorials... :)

ummm... I guess the main thing that scares everybody of MEL is the programming ... maybe you can do a series for people who have NO idea about programming and little steps that will guide them more into it. Soon enough, they'll buy the book too ;)

Me? I would love something like that... I would also buy your book but I want to get pretty good in C/C++ first and then I'll start thinking about MEL... (right now I'm sitting in my C++ class and as you can see, I'm very productive :D )


-Emo

hehe Emo: that's what the book is!

Actually the logic for the mini-tutorials is that we chose not to cover some topics that are intermediate in complexity but are really, really useful. I'm trying to hit some of those with these things.

The book itself is quite gentle for non-programmers -- I think the mini-tutorials are mostly useful to fill in gaps for people who have worked through the book and are looking for more.

-- Mark

Thanks for explaining...

one thing, is MEL too different from C/C++? I dont want to get into MEL and start mixing the languages
-Emo

they're similar, but different enough that I suspect you can keep them straight.

-- Mark

Man, I GOTTA get your book when cash allows...

I was gonna suggest "loops", but I noticed that it's already covered in Chap 9:) (dam!) hehe...

i would like to see a mini-tut on this slight problem i still try to figure out how to do: random brick texture with mel.

i would like a rendernode done in mel that gets asked a certain position to color, then looks up a (e.g. procedural fractal) at a gridpoint closest to the asked for position - depending on the grey value, it decides which brick texture to use (maybe 20 differant bricks). look up that texture and return the value so it can be rendered.

this would create really random and non-repeating brick textures and only needs a small amount of differant brick text. not sure if mel allows that - but it would be nice to know :D

But but but...

though you can use an expression for rendering like this it's REALLY BAD because it's so slow (has to be executed multiple times per pixel!!)

Why not use utility nodes??

-- Mark

mhh utility nodes - that sounds interesting - gotta research on them too now :)

i was not really after fast - i was after "how to get it to work at all" - i could bake it into one texture once i like how looks - walls usually do not move a lot ;)

the problem is that if you put expressions in your shading networks you may discover that it won't render at all because it's simply too heavy, or that it's too slow to test.

You've got plenty of tools to work with in the utility nodes and I'm pretty sure you can get an excellent start there -- and when that gets you to your limit, start looking into writing a shading node plug-in.

Expressions in render networks: Aaaaaaa!!! :banghead:

-- Mark