Smooth moves

Common knowledge has it that 'all Maya is MEL', but just how do you actually make use of the software's built-in scripting language? You can do it the 'right' way and learn how to code, create functions and all that jazz. However, even if you aren't a hardcore programmer, there's always the option to use MEL to tackle those specific problems that you encounter from day to day in production.

In this article, we'll show you how to solve a fairly common problem: the need to toggle the models in a scene between two different levels of smoothing. Rather than select all the models by hand to switch between unsmoothed (for ease of animation) and smoothed versions (for final display), we're going to create a simple MEL script to do the job automatically.

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