I wrote my first MEL script today

As you’re likely aware (because you all keep very up to date on everything related to me), I have used Houdini for the past two and a half years. I have been back to using Maya again since the summer. What have I learned in this time? Yes. That’s right. Maya is a piece of $%#&. Interpret that however you wish. For all you know, I could mean that it is a piece of gold. Yes… it could mean that.

Well, I decided to grab the reindeer by the reins and look a little more closely into MEL rather than just copying and pasting snippets from other people. I decided to try any make a bunch of parameters equal to the values in a bunch of other parameters. It doesn’t seem like Maya gives the user any easy way to do this. But why should it? Why would a user ever want to set a bunch of parameters to be equal to that of a bunch of other parameters? I miss you Houdini. I miss you very much.

Anyways, for those who are into sado machocism, here’s the MEL script:

string $copyobj = “pCube”;
string $pasteobj = “nurbsCylinder”;
$startnum = 1;
$endnum = 7;

for ($i = $startnum; $i <= $endnum; $i++)
{

connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.tx”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.tx”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.tx”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.tx”);
connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.ty”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.ty”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.ty”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.ty”);
connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.tz”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.tz”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.tz”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.tz”);

connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.rx”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.rx”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.rx”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.rx”);
connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.ry”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.ry”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.ry”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.ry”);
connectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.rz”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.rz”);
disconnectAttr ($copyobj+$i+”.rz”) ($pasteobj+$i+”.rz”);

};