MEL Scripting for Maya Animators: feedback?

[bakkaboy]

Hey Mark -

Ordered mine a couple a days ago. should be getting it today. I'll definately let you know.

[bentllama]

just going through it now, bit by bit...when I get more time and budget time towards MEL I will let you know what I think...so far with a brief look at the book, it all appears very useful...

[dwalden74]

I´d definitely look forward to reading a critical review of this book (and the other one) from a knowledgable scriptor. Anyone interested?

:beer:
David

[mark_wilkins]

David:

That would be great! Just keep in mind that because the two books are substantially different in content you probably won't see too many reviewers giving you an unqualified recommendation to "get this one, not that one."

Complete Maya Programming has substantial coverage of the API, and MEL Scripting for Maya Animators has a wide variety of examples of MEL as applied in effects animation and character rigging.

Assuming that reviews are generally positive for each book, as I suspect they will be, most people will end up getting one, the other, or both depending on which of those they find interesting.

-- Mark

[dwalden74]

Hi Mark-

probably won't see too many reviewers giving you an unqualified recommendation to "get this one, not that one."


hehe... That´s not what I´m looking for. Just a fair critique would be nice to read however, as I´m considering buying it :) I´m not realling looking for a comparison, as from what I´ve read so far they seem to be quite different. But I still don´t know if one or the other or both are right for me.

:beer:
David

[mustique]

just placed my order at amazon.com, where is only one review available at the moment. But guess it's not the kind of review your were asking for, much too unspecific. Bought it anyway.

[mark_wilkins]

Well, to David Walden: hopefully someone will post some relevant and insightful comments here that will help you know how to go! I'm curious what people think also, both what could be done better and what we succeeded at.

-- Mark

[bigfatMELon]

I got both books last week and I may be able to offer a qualified opinion (qualified for what I have no idea).

I find that MEL Scripting For Maya Animators offers good overall coverage for MEL but not necessarily offering too much beyond what an experienced user can extrapolate from Maya's shipping mel docs. However, I think it does a good job of filling in the cracks left by the Alias' docs. As such, I think this book is perfectly suited for beginner to intermediate users. And I believe that this is the audience that the authors intented to reach (probably 99% of the people on this forum).

Those who have previous experience with languages are going to be itching for deeper information. I was hoping for some coverage of advanced UI building but there isn't much beyond the most basic. Instead, the book spends more time on particles and the like, which I think is befitting of it's title.

I think the only fair strike against the book is the limited amount of character and rigging oriented MEL, which I would have preferred.

In all, it is well done, a far better source for those wanting to learn mel than the Alias docs and the most complete source in print to date. I don't think any will find it dissapointing and I recommend it.

For experienced users chomping at the bit for MEL information of a geekier kind (tho, still quite lacking in the UI department), I would recommend Complete Maya Programming instead. It offers less hand holding, some interesting function examples and a look at the API as well.

-jl

[mark_wilkins]

Yes, you're absolutely correct that we (and the publisher) viewed the book as more suitable for the beginning to intermediate reader, while David's was aimed at a more advanced audience. Thus, our approach was definitely more gentle for the inexperienced programmer who might be reading the book.

I've had feedback from some of the more-experienced readers that they've found interesting ideas in the examples, which are the part of the book that I'd assume would be the main attraction to them. It's doubtful that an experienced programmer would find much help in the parts of the book that discuss those language features that are common to other languages, however.

Regarding our relative emphasis on effects animation as opposed to character setup, that reflects the authors' backgrounds. Our character setup material was generously provided by our friend Stephan Osterburg from PDI, and we would have liked to do more, but it just wasn't possible to go farther with that in the time constraints we had to put the book together. (I've had a little more experience in this area personally since writing the book, so maybe I'll try to come up with a couple more examples to put up on the web site! :) )

As for the UI stuff, and I think David's in the same position here, again the idea was to provide enough information that the reader would know where to start. One could write an entire book on user interface development in MEL, and one of our original ideas was to spend the second half of the book just talking about user interfaces, but Chris and I decided to go a more example-oriented route instead.

I don't imagine anyone who reads this forum and is highly skilled with ELF would consider co-authoring something just on Maya user interfaces? :D

BTW, thanks, of course, for posting your thoughts... if we ever work on a second edition that kind of feedback will give us plenty of ideas about where to go with it.

-- Mark

[tropistic]

"if we ever work on a second edition that kind of feedback will give us plenty of ideas about where to go with it"

Instead of a second edition, I'd like to see just a second book, a Volume 2. Volume 1 introduces the reader to Mel programming, with that "relative emphasis on effects animation," and Vol 2 continues with an emphasis on character setup, utility scripts, etc. with lots & lots of examples...

Jay

[mark_wilkins]

Jay:

I agree! :thumbsup: Note, though, that there IS some character setup material in the existing book -- it's not just a book about effects animation. The "relative emphasis" I spoke of is not a total emphasis.

-- Mark

[dwalden74]

I was hoping for some coverage of advanced UI building

Hey Melon-

What kind of UI building do you mean here? I do quite a bit with ELF these days, and have learned it mostly from the MEL docs, various Internet sites, and an old AW MEL training book. Assuming your talking about advanced things here, I´d be interested in knowing what you have difficulty with? Oh, and thatnks for the book write-up!

:beer:
David

[AWAKE]

It is amazing to me how deep this board is with heavy hitters....

[bigfatMELon]

Not so much difficulty as much a desire to see documentation of things such as panel building and the like. And there are all manner of undocumented functions that appear through Alias' own code that would be great to see covered by someone.

I'm just about beyond the need for this (and quite low on my bottle of 1000 count Advil) but I'm sure there are others who could benefit greatly from it.

-jl

[bigfatMELon]

Now that I think of it, perhaps we can start a static thread specifically on ELF in order to consolidate all available net sources.

Anyone...? Bueler?

-jl

[bentllama]

what would you want the thread titled?

i am happy to accomodate the community... :)

[dwalden74]

And there are all manner of undocumented functions that appear through Alias' own code

I agree, a discussion like this would be interesting. How about new ELF stuff in 4.5?? The only one I´ve seen so far is -bgc for colorizing layouts....

a desire to see documentation of things such as panel building and the like

Bryan Ewert stated that it was very helpful to look at the attrCollection.mel script for learning more about scripted panels....in case your interested.

:beer:
David

[bigfatMELon]

what would you want the thread titled?


How about ELF? Oh wait, then we'd likely get flooded with LOTR geeks wanting to discuss the merits of Legolas' hair style.

-jl

[mark_wilkins]

Apologize for my brevity... I'm on a Handspring Treo because I'm moving... (just finished typing and I guess I wasn't that brief after all... heh)

MSMA, for length and audience reasons, covers basic UI design only. With what's covered you can build a functional but not necessarily pretty UI for a MEL script.

I know we'll take some heat for this, but we chose NOT to include a full discussion of formLayout, though it's not really a particularly advanced technique. It's mentioned in the context of when to use it and where to look it up, and it's used in a couple of examples.

The reason for this was that given how we were approaching the issue of UI design in the text, not only would coverage of formLayout require listing its features in full, but also we would have had to include a complete discussion of how to plan the layout of a window prior to using it... after all, by taking on the beginners in the audience we pretty much signed on to teach how to think through the process.

Really, this reflects our focus on communicating more about how to think through coding a script and what makes a good design at the expense of being feature-complete in our discussion (although someone who works through the book WILL have a reasonable exposure to formLayouts by the end.) I bring this issue up to give you an idea of what some of our thinking was on where to draw the line in the UI discussion.

On the other hand, we put in a healthy section on using match and regular expressions to validate user input so that scripts don't error out half finished. That's the kind of thing that even some of my more advanced colleagues would do well to read. :) More to the point, input validation is a matter of good software development practice, which we tried to keep a major focus.

So, bottom line, while the book may reflect our whacked priorities and our goal of being inclusive of beginners, nothing was left out lightly. Of course, now that I say that, someone's going to bring up the super-important issue that has never occurred to us. Hope not. Knock on wood. :D

As for a permanent ELF discussion, maybe it should be called something that will be more transparent to those who don't know it by that name? Maybe "Maya UI Building?" Cool idea, BTW.

-- Mark

[bentllama]

You gents now have a sticky thread dedicated to MEL UI building! :)

Here is the link:

http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=38483

:beer:

[mark_wilkins]

For those of you who are looking for more detailed reviews of this book, a few just got posted today on the book's Amazon.com site:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558608419/ref=ase_markwilkinsho-20/

(Full disclosure: The attentive might notice that I included our Amazon.com associate ID in that link. The Amazon.com associate program is how we've been covering the costs of the website where we've put the supplemental material for the book. The link without the associate ID is: http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558608419/)

:D

-- Mark

[mustique]

I got the book 3 days ago and am very happy I bought it.
I haven't finished reading yet, but I liked the teaching approach and it looks like I will feel myself willing to dig deeper in MEL. More charachter animation specific tutorials would have been nice though.

May be the next book might called
"Maya Charachter animation with MEL"!

[mark_wilkins]

Well, like I said above (I think) we would have liked to get farther into character setup applications as well -- however we were limited by our time to develop the book, and also character setup is an area where the applications of MEL tend to be fairly simple.

By the way, it's great to hear that our book made it as far around the world as Turkey!! :)

-- Mark

[mark_wilkins]

Hey all!

Now that the book is out there a lot more, I'm wondering if anyone has anything to add?

-- Mark

[dwalden74]

Hi Mark-

Congrats on your MEL book. I thought it was well thought out and intelligently written. I liked the fact that it did NOT assume that the reader was a complete idiot (a problem with many 3d books, IMHO). However, I do consider this an introductory book on MEL, and was hoping for further discussions on more advanced (geeky) topics. The section on the match command was one of the better topics, however I still was not sure exactly how it worked when I finished reading it (may be due to my own incompetence). More "advanced" things like this I think are still lacking in the book.

Also, you spend a considerable amount of time/pages on discussing uses of MEL with dynamics. I think this was a bit overdone. At a certain point it seemed more like a lesson in dynamics than a lesson on scripting, and I didn´t really like that. I mean, if you know scripting, then you can apply it to anything- setup, dynamics, modelling whatever. In a MEL book, I don´t really feel the need for the author to spend particularly more time on one area of use than on another, and I felt you did this a bit too much with dynamics. I mean, if you know MEL, and you know a bit about dynamics, then you can easilty combine the two without any step-by-step tutorial, right?

What´s cool about scripting is that once you´re aware of its possibilities, and know its syntax, then you can basicallly apply it to any area of the software that you desire. A general overview of different "applied" techniques helps the user in understanding the possibilities of MEL, but too much focus on one area of use and not enough in other areas seems to be an unfair approach to the reader.
Once you cover the MEL syntax, then your job as a writer/teacher should be to expose the reader to as many uses as possible.

This just popped into my mind: how about looking at how some major studios have implemented custom MEL tools in their pipeline? What are these tools and what do they do? This would certainly be an interesting topic, and, if selected with care, would help the reader understand a broader gamma of use. For example, one could be some custom UI tools used at Disney (BTW, I think I saw some funky blend shape panel on the Dinosaur DVD), another could be some automatic setup tools used at WETA, and yet another could be crowd management tools used at PDI-Dreamworks (or whatever, you get the idea).

All in all I definitely enjoyed the book and have already reccomended it to several people who are just starting out with scripting (two people have already bought it based on my reccomendation...can I get a percentage or something Mark :) hehe).

:beer:
David

[mark_wilkins]

Thanks! Your comment about the dynamics-oriented examples points up a particular problem in learning MEL, which is that people have to have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of Maya to get anywhere with it.

For better or worse, we went that way because we felt that discussing dynamics in detail would help in two ways.

First, by showing, in many cases, how particular operations would be done without MEL and then by showing the MEL equivalent, it draws a connection between the two that inexperienced programmers might in some cases find comforting.

Second, Maya's dynamics is so deep a topic that it's very difficult to talk about the solution to a specific problem without relying on aspects that a particular user might not know. By being comprehensive in our description of how the examples worked, we were trying to ensure that nobody would get left behind because they happened to be less skilled in dynamics.

Because the language and Maya itself are so closely intertwined, this is a difficult balance to strike, but I think we ended up somewhere that was philosophically reasonable for us, on the principle that it's always better to explain too much than too little.

Thanks for your thoughts!!! Based on what you're saying I have another project in mind that might be more to your liking, but I won't say anything about it now. :D

-- Mark

[skigil]

Mark..

I loved your book. I thought it was insightful for begginers and intermediates alike. I do have to agree with dwalden74 and say that I thought it would be a bit more technical. But then again, I guess that's why I bought the David Gould book, which is what I'm reading now. I agree with you in your preface, that it was surprizing to see no books on the MEL matter before yours.

Again, this book is excellent for people to start out. It has humor, and information. I appreciate the humor ;) So if you are cooking something up that is more advanced, I would be glad to read it. I'm looking forward to it :)

Last suggetion, more character work. I agree again with what dwalden74 said, it would be neat to see examples of MEL scripting that are used in everyday life in real studio pipelines. I would love to see a script that somebody from PDI wrote, or someone from Big Idea wrote, etc.

Thanks for the great book.

-skigil

[mark_wilkins]

Incidentally, though I have access to all kinds of interesting examples of applications at work, it's a problem to include them as case studies in the book because of nondisclosure issues.

I'm familiar with the Dinosaur facial animation interface to which you refer (having worked on that show for a few years) and I have to say it was very slick. The technology has probably by now been lost to the sands of time however. :D

Anyway, our coverage of character-rigging-related scripts was somewhat brief because we didn't have enough time to develop that and we wanted to make sure that we covered the few central principles clearly. Today, of course, I have all kinds of ideas about how that could be presented in more depth, but I'm not sure what the best way to get that out there would be.

-- Mark

[dwalden74]

. I would love to see a script that somebody from PDI wrote, or someone from Big Idea wrote

Skigil - Michael Comet wrote the saveWeights script on highend, which is used to transfer skin weights among characters (if you´re interested).


I'm familiar with the Dinosaur facial animation interface to which you refer (having worked on that show for a few years) and I have to say it was very slick. The technology has probably by now been lost to the sands of time however

Funny, after seeing the Dino DVD I was thinking of writing some scripted panel like this. I´m not sure what technology was behind it, but why do you feel it is outdated today, Mark?


people have to have a strong understanding of the fundamentals of Maya to get anywhere with it.

Yes, and I think it´s fair to say that a MEL book should be written for the more experienced user, rather than for the beginner. I feel it´s more important for the beginner to focus on the fundamentals of the software and it´s interface rather than jumping straight into MEL procedures. Then again, there are probably a lot of inexperienced users out there who might just think it´s cool to learn some MEL stuff without knowing much about Maya or 3D, and this might also be good for book sales ;)

BTW, I´d be happy to discuss with you any future ideas you have for MEL books if you´re interested.

:beer:
David

[mark_wilkins]

Yes, and I think it´s fair to say that a MEL book should be written for the more experienced user, rather than for the beginner.

My experience is that, except for certain basics, even the most experienced Maya users often only know pieces of the package in extreme depth. This means that it's really necessary to present basic coverage of a part of the software if there's any possibility that someone won't get it because they don't know that piece well.

In any case, it's always better to go too slow than too fast in an introductory book. Experienced users will skim for the good parts no matter what you write, while beginners will slog through every word unless they get frustrated because it leaves too much out.

Funny, after seeing the Dino DVD I was thinking of writing some scripted panel like this. I´m not sure what technology was behind it, but why do you feel it is outdated today, Mark?

I didn't say it was outdated, I said that it was *lost,* meaning that the parties involved have largely left Disney and those who remain at Disney probably (I'm guessing) are using something else instead. That tool was tied to a production pipeline that lived only for the duration of Dinosaur.

Someday I'll write my tell-all book about Dinosaur's production, but only when I'm really ready to burn all of my bridges in this business! :D :D

-- Mark

[stzaske]

Mark:

I just wanted to add my name to the list of people asking for more Character rigging type examples. I have NOT purchased your book, but I've bought just about EVERY other Maya book on the market, and many of them are useless to me because they are so general. I'm not sure of the numbers but I'd assume MANY more people (like myself) are interested in Character animation instead of particle effects or other areas. Any more, I only purchase Maya books and videos that are specific to character animation, because that way I can easily determine a value of the book to me. If it enlightens me to one or two new ways to use Maya in character animation, I'm happy.

BTW, don't forget the Video market. I recently purchased an AW video on facial setups and was super excited to see how great the content was. After watching it I could EASILY and immediately see the benefit to my work.

-=STZ=-

[mark_wilkins]

stzaske:

Well, I hope you have looked at the book before making your decision. True, only one of the four example chapters is directed at character rigging, but just about everything in the first half except the particle expressions chapter is directly applicable to tools that are useful in rigging characters.

MEL is a general toolkit for building systems, and it's not meaningfully different whether you're doing character rigging or dynamics. Unless you're looking to the book examples for quick solutions to specific problems that you're looking to solve (which was not their purpose) then I think you'd find the book extremely useful.

This is not to say that more character rigging material wouldn't have been good to have, but we were constrained by time in what we could do. Incidentally, the examples there DID cover the two most common uses for MEL in character rigging, the first being creating a user interface for a character and the second being developing expressions to ease animation.

-- Mark

[rendermaniac]

Hi Mark

I have been working my way through the book, although I haven't tried many of the examples yet. (will probably have to go back again and do that).

I think it is a really good introduction to MEL - I have found it really useful. I really like the emphasis on dynamics myself as this is what I am interested in. I can see the point though that there isn't enough character MEL.

Also the UI stuff does have several function calls which are not explained which is a little confusing. I think there is just enough to start building functional UI's. It would be nice to see a little more about running scripts from menus - ie putting it in just the rendering tab or modelling etc.

I also like the way that it assumes you have basic Maya and programming experience and isn't patronising. At the same time someone with no programming experience could still pick it up quickly and learn good practise like verifying data and modulising your scripts.

It would also be really nice to see a few case studies to produce a simple final (effects) shot. Not something like a complex like character animation, but maybe a street scene for your crowd simulator etc with proper car models. Maybe setting up scripts to apply suspension physics, wheels turning, damage etc.

Is there much scripting for rendering and modelling? I guess rendering is usually passed off to RenderMan though so that would be a little difficult. And modelling there isn't a lot I can think of that scripting would help with.

Your crowd simulator example is really damn nice though and opens up a lot of possibilities for extending and improving it.

I guess some real world case studies is what I am looking for - without getting into NDA problems with real shots.

I would definitely recommend it for learning MEL.

PS if you want to learn regular expressions read O'Reilleys Learning Perl. (and learn Perl too :) ) It does take quite a while to get the hang of them. Once you do you'll wonder how you got along without them!

Simon

[rapidarp]

I just recieved mine in the mail today via bookpool.com! I plan to start combing through it this weekend. I've browsed through the book a bit earlier this evening and it appears to be quite interesting. It looks like a detailed tutorial for MEL. Anyway, I think it will most likely help anyone willing to learn MEL.

:thumbsup:

Rapidarp

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