Week 2 // June 09 - June 15
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| My workstation in the Graphics Lab |
Most of the Monday (June 9) was spent talking to the SCS Help desk. They helped me unblock my account (from last summer) and gave my computer station an ability to print. Yay, I now have hard-copy versions of the two papers on mesh-based animations that I want to finish reading by Wednesday.
In the meanwhile, I am reading a book by David A. D. Gould called Complete Maya Programming An Extensive Guide to MEL and the C++ API. I already covered half of the chapter on fundamental Maya concepts. It was interesting to learn that behind Maya's Graphical User interface and its entire functionality is a network of nodes programmable in MEL (Maya Embedded Language) and C++. MEL is quite similar to C, and as David Gould mentions, "MEL is colloquially referred to as "C with $ signs."" Just like C, MEL has commands and variables and it requires you to always put a semicolon at the end of a command, yet, there is a 2-page appendix that denotes the differences between the two. I can't wait to start coding and experimenting with my own scripts.
On Tuesday (June 10), during the Graphics Lab meeting Takaaki talked about a paper which will be presented at SIGGRAPH this summer: KangKang Yin, Stelian Coros, Philippe Beaudoin, and Michiel van de Panne. Continuation Methods for Adapting Simulated Skills. I am really excited about attending the SIGGRAPH again and I am looking forward to the workshop during which this paper will be presented.
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| The book I am using to learn MEL |
I spent most of the Wednesday (June 11 ), learning MEL Programming Language. Using Script Editor I tried out the examples from the book and covered:
- issuing commands via command line, script editor, shelf and script files
- command arguments and command reference
- command modes
- variables (types, which include arrays, vectors and matrices)
Most of it is familiar to me because I am used to programming in various languages but there are some idiosyncrasies of MEL that will take some time to get used to (e.g. you can't directly assign a value to a vector component, which can only store three floats).
Alla also shared another paper, which will be presented this year at the SIGGRAPH. The paper is about computer animation in video games. I enjoyed watching the presentation by Chris Hecker at the Gaming Convention where he introduced their novel system for animating characters whose morphologies are unknown at the time the animation is created.
I started compiling the list of reference work and soon will begin learning about modeling in Maya.
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