Mel Gui's?

[wjpiovano]

Hi,

I need to develop a GUI which can manipulate objects through Maya. My main issue is that I don't want it to look like I'm just running a script in Maya; I want it to look like a stand-alone app that you can run without having any prior knowledge of Maya whatsoever. I was thinking of:

• Maya plug-in which opens a whole new maximized MEL window
• Separate GUI (C# or Java) which can call MEL commands on Maya (which is running in background)

Are either of these viable? As I said, I want someone to be able to open and use this app without having to play with Maya itself (it's a program for evolving 3D art).

And on a completely separate note, can MEL take a screenshot of the current 3D view?

Thanks.

[joojaa]

QUOTE(Will Piovan @ 12/06/07, 07:04 PM) [snapback]277679[/snapback]
Are either of these viable? As I said, I want someone to be able to open and use this app without having to play with Maya itself (it's a program for evolving 3D art).

Not really, its a terribly expensive way of doing this. So shipping one of theese installations will cost you 2000$ per pop minimum.

I mean if your going to do a lot of code anyway why not do the entire graph yourself? You probably only need a subset of maya anyway.

BUt yes you can comand maya from via a command port.

QUOTE
can MEL take a screenshot of the current 3D view

yes. playblast 1 frame.