Our animation production pipeline:
- An idea!
- Story, script, viz-dev, voice recording
- Layout, modeling, rigging, animation, surfacing/lighting/rendering, effects
- Compositing, audio, editing, film recording
- Marketing, distribution
We use MEL in the following ways:
- layout: aggregation of camera tools via custom UIs; camera animation
- modeling: custom modeling features (eg. mirroring parts, dent repair..)
- rigging: import/export of skin "weights"; creating constraints; UIs for animation
- animation: procedural animation of objects (eg. wheels)
- lighting/shading: assignment of textures to surfaces; custom lighting setups
- dynamics (effects): creation of fire, fluids, fur, foliage.. lots of math!
A lot of custom functionality is also created via plugins, and MEL is used to 'wrap' the plugins into useful aggregates.
We are big on code reuse, so MEL function libraries exist for doing string manipulation, file handling, error checking, etc. A 'wiki' based system is place for documenting existing procedure calls.