Week 2 - Mel Introduction

In week 2, I researched some information on Mel.
Here was a helpful website: http://www.kevinwafer.com/melscripting/index.html.

Mel is Maya's personal programming language which works independently of any compiling system. Maya takes a while to process the information, but constructing an already processed plugin that runs in Maya would alleviate that issue. Mel can facilitate the change of existing functions in Maya, which I was not aware of and sounds rather difficult. But I will investigate it further to learn how to use Maya more efficiently.

The script editor can be accessed at the lower area to the right of the Maya interface or under the Window and General Editors menus. Above this is the Animation Preferences icon. Appropriately, it is near the "command feedback window" which gives the result of all processed Mel code in Maya, which we learned in class. To the left of the "command feedback window" is the "Command line" to actually construct Mel scripts in just a smaller form. The author claims that the Command line can assist in beginning to write a block of code or an individual line. I tried putting the entire code for my RGB Color Wheel into this area and it still worked.

To send the constructed code to be processed, the author of this web page suggests to look under the Script menu within the Script Editor, which is not included in my version of Maya. Instead I found a menu called Command, which has the option Execute and has the hotkey listed as Ctrl + E. Other options include pressing Crtl + Enter or Enter next to the numbers panel on the right side of the keyboard.

The system or process that one has for constructing Mel scripts is important.
Here is a suggested process:
1. Know what the script will create.
2. Create a list of necessary steps to complete this and a list of goals to have when creating it. (Each section of code necessary for the script is called a procedure.)
3. Test individual procedures and once they function, combine them.

The rest of the tutorial is examples of scripts, which I can keep for further use and may come in handy for later situations.