MEL Scripting for Maya Animators (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics) Paperback – Illustrated, 25 July 2005

fantastic book for animators to learn technical skills to help laborious tasks :)

This book is probably the best non programmer-centric book I have read on learning MEL.The vast majority of MEL books are written with the assumption that the user has several years of C or C++ coding behind them.. not this one!Even us artists can now write our own tools and functions to our own specifications!Everything is broken down to its most basic level and examined and explained thoroughly.From learning how Maya creates a scene from dependecy nodes, to how and why you would declare a variable to drive commands every step of the way is handled with aplomb and really makes a seemingly complex thing seem reproducable with ease.All in a non patronising manner too!I have no coding background at all, yet I am already well on the way to creating my own scripts and tools that make my job faster and easier.This really is essential to any games development art team, 3d artist or wannabe technical directors..Mr. Wilkins and Mr. Kazmier; I salute you!

I came to this book in the hope that I could learn the basics of MEL, coming from a background of animation but little in the way of actual techie knowledge. But the contents of the book are presented so humourlessly, so matter-of-factly, like an old school text book, that my eyes soon began to slip off the page.Have you ever read a book where you'd find that your brain had gone for a wander and you hadn't actually read the last few sentences at all? You'd then sit yourself upright, take the book firmly in hand , go back a few lines and start again. But then, lo and behold, your mind goes of cherry picking again just a few lines later. Well, this book is exactly like that.It would probably appeal to programmers who can read and understand most of this already (although the one programmer I lent it to soon slid it back to me complaining it was "too dry"). But for the likes of me who literally have NO clue about programming languages, it did a pretty good job of scaring me off. Luckily there are free tutorials on the usual list of web sites (highend3d, cgtalk etc) that do an infinitely better job of breaking you into MEL that once I feel a bit more confident I might come back to this book later. But the claim that it's for beginners just isn't true for me.The tragedy is, it's full of all the information you could possibly want, it's just the presentation of the material.Zzzzzzzzz....