Customer Reviews

MEL Scripting for Maya Animators, Second Edition (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Computer Graphics)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Mark and Chris have done an enormous service to the Maya animation community by writing this book. I was very impressed, as I reviewed this book prior to its publication, with how well they were able to communicate important programming concepts to an audience that usually has little or no experience with writing code. Many of the chapters will serve as an invaluable reference for future projects, while the examples show how the concepts are applied in the context of specific requirements. There is no other book on the market that specifically teaches this language, even to experienced coders. Animators with absolutely no prior knowledge of programming may buy this book with confidence, knowing it will clearly explain the concepts they need to know to use MEL effectively in their work. Highly recommended.

This book is a very clear introduction to the mel scripting language. Often a user will need or want to explore mel to get the most out of Maya, to speed up workflow, repeat tasks more quickly, or achieve complex actions difficult to do in the GUI alone. Those users with programming experience will have little difficulty understanding mel fundamentals from the documentation included with Maya, but those with little or no previous programming experience will have a tough time learning from the documentation alone. Now Maya users of all levels of experience can gain the benefits of mel through the concepts presented in this book, in the form of detailed explanations and dozens of example scipts.
Mark Wilkins and Chris Kazmier have writen an excellent book for anyone who wants to learn mel and get the most out of Maya. I highly recommend it.

Reading the book cover to cover, I found myself obligated to write a review here about it .
I will divide my review to Good and Bad

The bad:
This book is DEFINTLY not for animators, means, it's for programmers, if you are an art person and never seen or heard about programming, this book will be very difficult to learn.

Second. a LOT OF errors!! And I don't mean errors on the text, if you download the files in the site(which should be updated) they contain a lot of bugs!! some times while reading it, I found myself debugging the author CODE!! Outrages!

Third, some of the chapters are not in place!, for example the author start in chapter one using all sorts of parameters and varibale,but only in chapter six he bothers to explain about them

Forth, as mentioned earlier there are chapters on vectors, recursive functions and more, this is for sure not for beginners, and for sure not for persons with out some math background or programming background
.
Fifth, there is to much examples on the GUI and less examples on practical things, like moving particles and stuff( there is some of it , but few..)This is sad because some of the examples the author does write are very good.

The good
This is basically the only book on MEL, and if you are joining a big team and you have some background in programming and some mat skills, you will find it very interesting because not only the author explain code, his examples are interesting, cover most of the basics in the studio needs, and some of the tips he is giving during the book worth gold, he explain many times how to work in group, how to program to someone else and what to think about before you even start to program, it can easily be seen that the person who wrote it work in the subj .
All in all a good book to start , but in some point t it missing the point
lengthy chapters with no actual code or explaining any useful things
It seems as if the author try to catch it all...
To explain things to beginners while giving advice for novice programmers...

Not only is this giving you a look at MEL scripting but it is also giving you a course in programming itself. I feel so much more comfortable with Maya now because of the fact I am learning the inner workings of the application. It's almost like learning Flash Actionscripting, you are only scratching the surface if you are just doing basic tweening and moving objects around the screen. Once you learn the scripting side of things, that's when your ability grows beyond basic use of the application.

This book did a lot for getting me rolling on Mel. I found though, that even still, I had to do a lot of question asking of people I knew that know MEL. As is the case with most books on topics so complicated, it has a little trouble in the "why" and "would be applied to..." areas, but overall, it is a great buy, and the best resource available for those mentioned in the title. Do you animate? Want to learn about MEL? Pick it up.

I've had a string of bad luck with computer books lately so I was hesitant to get this one but I'm glad I did. The title says it all. I would not encourage people who are new to Maya or people who already know MEL to read this book, but for those of us experienced Maya animators who need a place to start with MEL it's perfect. Very well done and clearly written.

Finally a book that goes beyond basic Maya and explores some of the powerful features that allow you to truly achieve total control over the program. There are very few books out there that cover this topic and this one does a very fine job at doing so.

Well, I had little experience using MEL scripting for Maya, so picking up this book was what I figured, an excellent way to learn. From the first few chapters, I was already starting to create experimental scripts. This is an excellent book for anyone looking to learn the down and dirty with Maya. Lots of detail and examples to help get you creating your own tools and scripts.

What I like about this book is that it isn't just a rehash of the documentation. It talks about how MEL and expressions fit into the bigger picture of Maya, which is a perspective I never got from the documentation.

The first half of the book is all about how the MEL language and expressions work, and the second half is a series of fourteen examples that cover dynamics, character rigging, and even a simple crowd system. The discussion in the first half is very straightforward but not too simple or too technical, and the examples illustrate very useful techniques. (One nice thing is that you can download the code for the examples -- even the odd commands that the chapter asks you to type along the way -- from the authors' website.)

I would have loved to have twice as many examples, but they already take up half of a thick book, so I guess I have to wait for Volume 2.

This is a pretty usefull book for everyone who wants to go deeper in the expression\MEL field.
Plus no programming background is required.
The book contains tons of usefull examples and MEL scripts.
The only bad point is that it comes whithout CD Rom.