Well, the title's pretty self-explanatory. I was just wondering the other day if Blender could ever have a system similar to paint effects in Maya. I then thought one step beyond that, and wondered if Blender could ever make use of the .mel files Maya uses for paint effects strokes.

So how about it? Could it (legally) be done, or would the Blender Foundation be sued to the hilt be Alias Wavefront? Any ideas?

LethalSideParting

mel is maya scripting language. it's too specific to maya to be ported to blender. python is perfectly good.

there are FAR too many functions in mel. And so many are fully devoted to many of maya's own features that porting is impossible. more people know python than mel anyway.



besides that we'ed all get sued by Alias|Wavefront.
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dittohead

Quote:

besides that we'ed all get sued by Alias|Wavefront.

Thought so

Oh well. Just curious, really (don't worry, I wasn't gonna start a long 'build it in now!!!' thread. I just wanted to know if it was legally possible).

LethalSideParting

LethalSideParting wrote:

So how about it? Could it (legally) be done, or would the Blender Foundation be sued to the hilt be Alias Wavefront? Any ideas?

You might want to look at http://jaya.sourceforge.net, which has implemented a MEL script interpreter. The hundreds of stubbed functions need to be implemented and tied together with Blender equivalents (if they exist), but this could work in theory. This is probably a very major undertaking. But don't let that stop you.

Norman

I would prefer to keep the Python route in Blender. Although we've made a quite mess in the past, with lousy compatibility, it still is powerful enough to remain there.

Python can be improved looking at how MEL works as well, making it possible in the future to make a MEL->Python conversion, at least for some of the MEL scripts out there.

Hopefully a good & active team of developers will pop up who like to continue with Python improvements in Blender...