MEL Resources

Deborah R. Fowler

Resources for MEL (Maya Embedded Language)

Updated on April 15 2013

MEL is the scripting language used for Maya (analogous to Houdini's Hscript). It is descended from UNIX shell scripting. Tasks achieved through Maya's GUI can usually be achieved with MEL, as well as some not available from the GUI - procedural methods in particular.

The syntax is similar to Perl and Tcl. Paraphrasing from Wiki "MEL is fairly limited compared to mainstream scripting languages... Python was added to Maya as an alternative to MEL in Maya 8.5. Still MEL offers some advantages to Python:

discoverability
legacy of code

MEL is often criticized for its lack of programming features, and object orientation. In practice however MEL is used as a metaprogramming language where MEL just instructs Mayas node architecture to solve the problem."

In 705, our focus will be on Python, however MEL is also useful.

Sites: There are lots and lots of site, documentation and books about MEL. Here area a few good starting points for learning MEL:

MEL and Expression pdf here
Professor Malcolm Kesson has information on MEL at www.fundza.com
Looking at previous projects in 705 under the title "Mel Matrix"

Here are some quick note that you might find useful for what we will be doing with MEL in 705: