Mel and Python do go hand in hand at times. | Jan Pijpers: Technical Artist

Seeing as some developers still work with mel and a lot of legacy scripts within companies are still written and maintained in mel its sometimes useful to call python functions in mel when having to extend those old legacy scripts. now most people know you can do a:

python("module.function()")

1	python("module.function()")

inside of mel.

But I recently found a mel wrapper function that does this for you!!! And not only that it also adds the proper from module import function path as well!

So this is actually quite usefull so i thought i’d share it here:

for example. Let say you have the following python script that connects two attributes.

def connectAttributes(sourceAttr, targetAttr):
    import pymel.core as pm
    pm.PyNode(sourceAttr) >> pm.PyNode(targetAttr)

import maya.mel as mel
result = mel.createMelWrapper(connectAttributes, returnCmd = True)
mel.eval(result)
print result

def connectAttributes(sourceAttr, targetAttr):

import pymel.core as pm

pm.PyNode(sourceAttr) >> pm.PyNode(targetAttr)

import maya.mel as mel

result = mel.createMelWrapper(connectAttributes, returnCmd = True)

mel.eval(result)

print result

Save this to a file and store it somewhere in the maya scripts paths.

(i.e. my s\Documents\maya\2014-x64 )

Now import the script:

import scriptsLocation.yourFileName as ca

1	import scriptsLocation.yourFileName as ca

This will run the script and as I added a print it will output the actual code it evaluates:

global proc  connectAttributes (string $sourceAttr,string $targetAttr) {
    python("from scriptsLocation.yourFileName import connectAttributes");
    string $tmp = ( "\"" + $sourceAttr + "\"" + "," + "\"" + $targetAttr + "\"" ); 
    python(("connectAttributes(" + $tmp + ")")); }

global proc connectAttributes (string $sourceAttr,string $targetAttr) {

python("from scriptsLocation.yourFileName import connectAttributes");

string $tmp = ( "\"" + $sourceAttr + "\"" + "," + "\"" + $targetAttr + "\"" );

python(("connectAttributes(" + $tmp + ")")); }

and now you can go to mel and do:

rehash;
connectAttributes("pSphere1.translateX", "pSphere2.translateX");

1 2	rehash; connectAttributes("pSphere1.translateX", "pSphere2.translateX");

*note i added the “rehash” to make sure the mel scripts are refreshed.

If you want to get more information about this wrapper function run the following lines inside of a python tab in maya:

import maya.mel
help(maya.mel.createMelWrapper)

1 2	import maya.mel help(maya.mel.createMelWrapper)

Or take a look here:

http://download.autodesk.com/global/docs/maya2014/en_us/index.html?url=files/GUID-8A96A8DB-FD6F-434F-A878-288DD84E99C7.htm,topicNumber=d30e727627