Mel script, is it possible to identify UV shells and store them in an array?

[malcolm_341]

Hi there, I'm an artist learning mel. I need to store the selected UV shells into an array, but I can't find anything in the documentation or online. Is there really no concept of a UV shell index in Maya. Basically I need to perform an action on each shell so I need to store them in in an array so I can select them one at a time. For example, select first shell, scale it by 50%, select second shell scale by 50%, etc. That's not actually what I need to do, but if that's possible that will solve my more complex problem.

[olarn]

🤔🤔

http://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-Tech-Docs/Commands/polyEvaluate.html#flaguvShellIds

[malcolm_341]

I already looked at that before posting, unless I'm not understanding how to use that command it's pretty much useless since there's no way to select anything that command prints out. All it does is tell you what index the UV shell is, but there is no way to select that index because UV shells don't exist as far as I can tell?

[olarn]

Im afraid that you're going to have to construct your own uv shell look up from those list.

Event maya default "expand uv to uv shell" script have to resort to pretty roundabout way to get those lists.

C:\Program Files\Autodesk\Maya201X\scripts\others\polySelectBorderShell.mel

[malcolm_341]

I don't think I'm advanced enough, If I could find a way to assign the index to a variable then I might be able to work it out I did find this command which works, but for some reason I can't select it after without getting an error?

$tempShell = `texGetShells`;
select $tempShell;
// Error: line 1: Invalid attribute name: pPlane1.map[1] pPlane1.map[5:6] pPlane1.map[11] //

[olarn · Accepted solution]

Because all those lines are jammed in to the first item of tempShell string array instead of one each as "select" expected.

$tempShell = `texGetShells`; // type is string[]
tokenize($tempShell[0], $tempShell); // ["xx.map[0] xx.map[1]",] -> ["xx.map[0]","xx.map[1]"]
select $tempShell;

[malcolm_341]

Oh wow, I'm not familiar with the tokenize command yet I'll need to read the docs on this today. This looks like I'll need to create a counter and then loop through all the items and update the counter and use tekenize to store each UV shell as an array of UVs I can then select and run my code on. Does that sound like the right way to go?

[malcolm_341]

Here's how I ended up solving it thanks to olarn for tokenizing it for me. Still not confident with that command. In this example the for loop performs a rotate on each UV shell individual and then ends when it reaches the number of UV shells the user had originally selected.

ConvertSelectionToUVShell;
$shellUVs = `ls -sl`;

$findShells = `texGetShells`;
$numbShells = `size $findShells`;
$shellIndex = 0;

     for ($item = 0; $item < $numbShells; ++$item)
     {
          select $shellUVs;
          $findShells = `texGetShells`;
          tokenize($findShells[$shellIndex], $findShells); // ["xx.map[0] xx.map[1]",] -> ["xx.map[0]","xx.map[1]"]
          select $findShells;
          polyEditUV -pu 0.25 -pv 0.75 -a -14.449228 -rr 1 ;

          $shellIndex = $shellIndex + 1;
     }

[olarn]

If you've just beginning to script, I would recommend learning python instead.

In mel you'll spend majority of the time fighting with the language itself..

just fyi legacy mel code can be call to and from python

http://help.autodesk.com/cloudhelp/2018/ENU/Maya-Tech-Docs/CommandsPython/eval.html

[malcolm_341]

Thanks for the help, Python is on the road map once I become more comfortable with coding concepts, I'm self teaching so mel seems like a good way to understand the fundamentals. What's the main advantage over mel in this particular situation, would Python be able to select the UVs shells easier?