MEL GUI

Deborah R. Fowler

Updated on March 22 2013

Creating a GUI in MEL

Disclaimer: This page is to get you started and is by no means complete or extensive. It's intention is to compare the concepts learned in VSFX 705 in python as they would relate to MEL.

We have studies the syntax of mel for scripting, however we also need to add user level controls to our project. Again, there are various ways to go about creating GUI.

This site is handy here but my preferred method to find out windowing options is to type into the script editor
help window and then hit ctrl-enter to give you the available list of commands

To make a window

window -title "Kermit" -widthHeight 300 200 myWindow;
showWindow myWindow;

The problem is, if you run this again, it will say it is not unique, so you need to delete it if you are doing to bring it up again.
// Error: line 1: Object's name 'myWindow' is not unique. //
So add the line above the previous code to do just that.

if (`window -exists myWindow`) deleteUI myWindow;

Layout of your window

Columns
if (`window -exists myWindow`) deleteUI myWindow;
window -title "Kermit" myWindow;
    columnLayout -columnAttach "both" 5 -rowSpacing 5 -columnWidth 100;
    button -label "make sphere" -command "sphere";
    button -label "make cube" -command "polyCube";
showWindow myWindow;

Rows
if (`window -exists myWindow`) deleteUI myWindow;
window -title "Kermit" myWindow;
    rowLayout
        -numberOfColumns 2
        -columnWidth 120 120
        -columnAlign2 "center" "center";
button -label "make sphere" -command "sphere";
button -label "make cube" -command "polyCube";
showWindow myWindow;

Similarly you can use ie. gridLayout -numberOfColumns2 -cellWidthHeight 80 20

frameLayout (creates boxes) and setParent command - ends the definition of layout controls to be children of the previous layout.
formLayout (exact positions)

Dialogs

How to make your application respond to your GUI?

Here is a simple example to use as a starting point

if (`window -exists myWindow`) deleteUI myWindow;
window -title "Kermit" -widthHeight 500 200 myWindow;
intSliderGrp -label "amount" -min 1 -max 60 -value 10 -field true -changeCommand "phyllotaxis" total;
showWindow myWindow;

proc phyllotaxis()
{
    int $total = `intSliderGrp -q -value total`;
    print $total;
    print "\n";
}

phyllotaxis();

Here is my exercise - completed code.