Review: Professional MEL Solutions for Production

Let‘s not beat about the bush here, MEL scripting is hard. Any book that hopes to give the middle level animator or artist a leg up into understanding the realms of what being a TD really means has, therefore, got to be accessible. Being somewhere between intermediate and advanced, I‘ll happily admit to not knowing everything about my weapon of choice, I sometimes find that books on areas of CGI, specifically those in relation to scripting, are either too condescending or too high handed. Thankfully for everyone, Professional MEL Solutions for Production is neither.

The book begins by discussing scripting editors, the Maya Script Editor being woefully inadequate as most people who use it will know. It then pulls you into the process of understanding the usage of MEL‘s commands, then pushes you quite quickly into the creation of GUI‘s or windows containing these commands. It carries on by going through the process of scripting an improved Bookmark Manager whilst impressing upon the reader the importance of clean, annotated scripts. At this point the reader will know that this book has been written to improve upon a busy pipeline. It is after this point that the weaker of the wannabe technical directors may find their vision blurring and thoughts turning to putting the kettle on. From this point, the GUI creation is predominantly procedure driven and we begin to get into some very in-depth programming. The book tells us in line-by-line detail how to make an extensive Layer Manager and then covers Recursion, or the process of calling a procedure within itself. The last section of the book is the most intense scripting I have ever had to digest, without a doubt, and although I understood much of it, some parts took quite a while to truly sink in – in fact, some of them are still trying to.

Not for the faint hearted, the book covers topics in an informative and extensive manner. Thankfully Kevin Mannens and Ed Caspersen bring a colloquial style into play which helps the reader to get through the really heavy bits. For example, much later on the scripting goes up a serious notch, not surprising given that it has been created by a C++ programmer. After a second or two of concern over my ability to take it all in, the moment of worry was dispelled as I laughed out loud on reading that the concept for the script, anno.mel, designed for annotating the timeline with frame locked text strings, came when the programmer, “saw the need for this tool…in a caffeine induced hallucination after 52 hours of consecutive lipsynching.” The breaking of the hefty lumps of MEL scripting with this humour really takes the edge of the brain dump you know you are going to get. Anyone who names a chapter heading as ‘First Blood’ is well aware of how hard this subject can be and wants to make it as painless as possible.

To really get into this subject matter, you need to throw in an awful lot of your time, but at least with Professional Mel for Production you have a book which, although chock-a-block full of info, is actually a really good read.

VERDICT

A good book covering difficult topics with gentle hand holding and good humour.

SCORE: 9/10

DETAILS
ISBN-13: 978–1-59822–066-7
ISBN-10: 1–59822-066–7
Pages: 549

PRICE
$44.95 / £27.25* / €31.63*

*Currency conversion

CONTENTS
1. Under The Hood (pg. 1)
2. Conditional Statements, Iterations, and Procedures (pg. 33)
3. First Blood (pg. 59)
4. Hands-On MEL Coding: km_bookmarkManager(pg. 83)
5. Hands-On MEL Coding: km_debrisCreator. (pg. 115)
6. Scene Management with ewc_extendedLayerManager (pg. 159)
7. Recursion (pg. 363)
8. MEL and Expressions (pg. 425)
9. Annotating the Timeline: anno.mel (pg. 465)
10. Index (pg. 541–547)

PUBLISHER
Wordware Publishing Incorporated
www.wordware.com

AUTHOR
Kevin Mannens: www.td-college.com