help with MEL

Busterizer

I am looking into writing exporter for Maya 2013 with Mel. My goal here is to be able to export static model and animated model. I am more interested in exporting animated model which would have same abilities as md5 animated models, since there isn't md5 exporter for Maya 2013, and 3ds Max exporter is incredibly slow and can crash on medium-poly models. Can somone point me in right direction here?

I was looking into Maya MEL documentation from which I am not sure which parts should be c++ compiled source code and which should be saved as mel script (please note that i have reasonable knowledge in programming).

I also came across these
http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/RobTheBloke/www/research/index.htm
http://nccastaff.bournemouth.ac.uk/jmacey/RobTheBloke/www/maya/
http://www.gamedev.net/page/resources/_/technical/apis-and-tools/how-to-write-a-simple-maya-model-exporter-r1906#6

I hope these are still valid sources considering age of this pages.

I would mimic obj and md5 formats but store the data in binary format. Are there any working examples that export scripts that go by the rules of obj and md5 formats?

passerby

your best to ignore mel, or use the c++ api or python api for it all
http://docs.autodesk.com/MAYAUL/2013/ENU/Maya-API-Documentation/files/Writing_File_Translators.htm

Froyok

Also, if you like diving into the code of someone else, you can try to look at the MESA importer/exporter. This is for source content, but this should help you to know how the breakdown of the Maya meshes is done before exporting.

For the obj format, I know a python version, not mel : http://www.hodge.net.au/sam/blog/?p=250

passerby

that obj one would work very very slowly, if you want decent performance you will pretty much need to implement it in the api, and use the mfnMesh or the mit classes to get the needed data.