MEL Progress

As part of Modeling and Rigging I have been able to talk a lot to my lecturer about scripting in MEL. Now I have more direction with it I feel like I'm making more progress.

Currently for Live Brief project we are setting up a scene for rendering in Mental Ray, but if we have time we would like to render in Renderman, although this means the 20+ materials would need to be converted, have the textures re-applied etc; so I am working on a script to help us do this quickly in one go. 

So far I have it working to convert the materials to a new set of Mental Ray materials, and apply them to the appropriate objects, I'll convert this over to Renderman when I get to the studio.

 Currently if it comes across a material with transparency or alpha data plugged in it skips it, I would like to build in a function to plug this in, as well as the colour data.

 If I can get the script fully working in this way it might serve as a useful tool to convert over any scene from mental ray. Even for copying diffuse colour values and creating Renderman Materials with the same value, but that will be later down the line.


Alongside creating this I am following tutorials, which have been very useful in teaching me new commands and broaden what I know. I have created this constraint tool from following a digital tutors tutorial.


So far this is probably the most useful thing I have created, I want to make it my own by adding in the ability to create aim constraints, as I use them often. But the simple ability to add a quick constraint with maintain offset on or off will save so much time, and is much more convenient.

Like always I want to keep pushing my coding further. I want to create Conway's Game of Life in MEL as a more long term goal, which I have made some progress with but has a long way to go, but for now I want to keep adding to these tools, making them more reliable and more useful.

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