Getting Height With Mel

[doug-hines]

Is there a way to get the height of a mesh object through mel.

I know that you can do this with the distanceTool, but that requires knowing the x/y/z coord of the highest and lowest verts in the mesh.

Any ideas?

[joojaa]

If the object is int world space just querry the bb and calculate the differebce between high low value.

[doug-hines]

...what is bb?

[joojaa]

BoundingBox

[doug-hines]

Sorry for asking all these questions. I am currently at a machine that does not have maya installed, but am still attempting to write this script.

is Bounding box an attribute of the polymesh, sort of like cube1.boundingbox ??

How would I go about accessing the high Y and low Y coordinates inside the component selection?

Again, sorry. I don't have any live references I can check against.

[joojaa]

No ita a attribute of the transform (its used for culling). Assuming the object is in world space then the height is:

CODE
{
  float $temp[];
  $temp=xform -q -boundingBox;
  print ("height of this worldspace object is: "+abs(($temp[1]-$temp[4])));
}

However if its under something not in worldspace and that space its slanted you get that spaces up instead, you can always parent it temporarily to a worldspace group for the height but...

[doug-hines]

would polyEvaluate do the same thing? or would xform work better all in all?

[doug-hines]

While i was fiddling around with polyEvaluate, it occured to me that I must also find a way to center pivots through MEL.

Would worldSpace or relativeSpace be more appropriate?

I am assuming that a user might set pivots before they use my script. I need to find a way to set them back to the center of a mesh without knowing if or how much they were altered before my script was run.

[ewerybody]

polyEvaluate is for poly only. guessed taht? ;]
But the bb-attribute is at every transform, not only ones with polygon-shapes.

You can also get it via getAttr.

CODE
getAttr pCube1.boundingBoxMinY;
// Result: -0.5 //
getAttr pCube1.boundingBoxMaxY;
// Result: 0.5 //

[doug-hines]

After a thorough reading, it has become obvious that I am an idiot. The tool I am looking for is built into xform.

CODE
xform -cp;

That's all it took. Here I am attempting to calculate the center of the bounding box based on the world space min and max coordinates... and there's a nice little built in tool.

Sorry for wasting everyone's time x.x