By far my favorite change this week is a brand new script. I'm still pretty new to MEL script and I'm being lazy about setting up Python to learn PYMel. MEL is weird! I'm no stranger to programming languages or Unix command line style stuff, but MEL just comes off as so... ad hoc and scatterbrained. But, I have managed to figure out how to write a simple MEL script that will write MEL scripts to copy the positions of the control points of the wire's for the facial expressions!

Now I can copy face shapes! I can mix and match an eyebrow shapes with different lip shapes and so forth, to create a variety of expressions! There's still a ton of saving to do before it saves me too much time, though. However, there will always need to be some special adjustments for the camera and the particulars. But, it should a huge time saver!

However, none of my previous facial expressions will work now because I also made some new changes to the wires. I cleaned up the positions of the control points (now that I know how to access their values directly) and make them symmetric across the middle of the face. Finally, I noticed that I hadn't frozen the transformations yet, so I did that as well. That last part basically zeroes all the translation/rotation/scale values at the current position of the object. It's important to do before you apply real animation work to rig components (I've long since automated the freezing of the model itself prior to binding). Because it is zeroed, any wire positions saved off faces made prior to it will now be horribly offset and completely unusable.


Regardless, I'm really happy with this new script! Figuring out how to access the wire CVs was really difficult, because of how weird and varied doing things in MEL is. I've been thinking of doing a journal on the scripts I've created so far, and posting some of them. But, I don't know how interested anyone would be in them. Most people here seem to use programs other than Maya.