Maya: MEL and the Length of Curves

MEL is, like Python, a scripting language in Maya. In this tutorial I'll show how MEL always works in the background and protocols all we do in Maya. Then we load the image of a drone photo, showing a lake from the top, from WikiCommons as a backdrop image, called an Image Plane. On that plane we check dimensions and units and build a path for joggers, i.e. a NURBS curve.

Finally, and that's the focus of this tutorial, we measure the length of the path using three options, two of which use MEL.

Edvard Toth's MEL script curveLength can be found here: https://github.com/edvardtoth/MEL-Scr...

My drone image a small vulcanic lake in Germany is in the Wiki Commons: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi...

For a more broad intro to MEL see this tutorial:    • Maya: Getting a Taste of MEL