Plz Advice Me

[nik200]

hi friends,

            i am a total newbie to this CG world. basically i hav some tech background, i am in the last year of my

btech computer science. and i just hav some very base knowledge in 3d softwares like Maya, 3D max etc (thanks to my
roommates). i wud like to explre in to the programing side of this(dnt treat it as some nonsense thoughts of a fresher & i think i dnt hav much artistic skills). i heard about MEL scripting & 3D max scripting, dnt know much about that.

can anyone tell me the scope of this domain. wat i mean, is this MEL is some language like c or java (i hav

some base idea on both)? is that easy to learn? which all will be the combination tools/languages with this MEL?
(bcoz i surfed net a lot, found PERL, PYTHON, C, C++ etc in the skilllist with MEL. how all these can be used with
MEL?) or do i need to concentrate only as a MEL-Programmer? is there any chance for that.

plz help me. i hav to decide my final year project on the basis of this. thats y i am posting it in carear

advice area. plzzzzzz

with thanks & regards
arjun

[joojaa]

Maya:

Mel looks like good old *niX shell scripting ( ad that in turn loooks quite much like c but with $ before variables), however yucan get it flavored as python. However please note even with python and possibly c++ api your still using maya, so if you dont know how to use maya you wnt know how to do either of theese things very effectively. Mayas a way to think, act and be.

Furthermore mel is about understanding the dg graph, and mayas internal working as you cant just program whatever you want but rether your expected to play ball with the sometimes obscure underlying system. So being able to see what it is yoru working on is paramount, just because it works don't make you happy here, speed is aof a essence when you work with hundreds of thousands of points.

[nik200]

from ur reply i think i must be gud in maya's fundamentals & internal architecture (so i hav a long way to go). still glad to know that there is some area that is more techie & logical than artistic(as i tld earlier, i dnt hav much artistic skills). correct me if i am wrong.

can u tell me something more about the role of this python & c++ kind of pure programing languages in a hi-fi graphic software like maya?

[joojaa]

QUOTE(arjun85 @ 06/01/07, 12:45 PM) [snapback]267277[/snapback]
can u tell me something more about the role of this python & c++ kind of pure programing languages in a hi-fi graphic software like maya?

They allow you to author new dg nodes and file readers. wich all in all everything maya can do. on the renderside it allows you to make new custom/optimized shaders

[nik200]

thanks a lot for ur comments... now let me try wat i can do with them.
thank u again