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I am new to using MEL to write scripts. I have two radio buttons, one and two. When radio button 'two' is selected, I want the script to select the two cube objects I have created in my scene (cube1 and cube2), so that when I use my 'rotate' button (a regular push button), both of the cubes rotate.

On the other hand, if the radio button 'one' is selected, then only one of them (cube1) should rotate when I press the rotate button.

I have my radio buttons as follows:

  $radio1 = `radioCollection`;          
                        //my radio buttons
                        $one  = `radioButton -label "1 cube"`;
                        $two = `radioButton -label "2 cubes"`; 

radioCollection -edit -select $one $radio1; //so that this one is selected by default

and for the rotate button I have this that rotates the cube object 'cube1' by 30 degrees. This is currently NOT linked to my radio buttons.

button -label "rotate" -command "setAttr cube1.rotateZ `floatSliderGrp -q -value 30.0`";

Thoughts? Should I query the radio button's state? This would be so much easier for me in another language! I could see myself saying something like "if $radiotwo.pressed, then cube1.rotateZ && cube2.rotateZ"

user3295674
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1 Answers1

1

All Maya UI items are completely imperative: you have to issue commands and get results, there is no 'state': the 'button' or whatever will just be the string name of the object you'll use for issuing the commands

To get the state of the radiocollection you call radioCollection -q -select on the collection, which will return the name of the selected radio button; you'd use that to drive your logic.

string $w = `window`;
string $c = `columnLayout`;
string $radiocol = `radioCollection "radio buttons"`;
string $one_cube  = `radioButton -label "1 cube"`;
string $two_cube = `radioButton -label "2 cubes"`; 
radioCollection -edit -select $one_cube $radiocol; 


showWindow $w;

global proc string get_radio_state(string $radio)
{
   string $selected =  `radioCollection -q -select $radio`;
   return `radioButton -q -label $selected`;
}

print `get_radio_state($radiocol)`;

fiddle with the radio buttons and get_radio_state($radiocol); it should return the name of the selected button.

If you're already familiar with other languages, you should probably skip MEL and jump straight to maya python: it's much more capable and less tweaky. Lots of discussion here and here

For comparison, here's a python version of the same idea:

w = cmds.window()
c =cmds.columnLayout()
rc = cmds.radioCollection()
cmds.radioButton('one', label="1 cube")
cmds.radioButton('two', label = "2 cubes")

def print_selected(*ignore):
    print "selected", cmds.radioCollection(rc, q=True, select=True)

btn = cmds.button("print selected", command=print_selected)

cmds.showWindow(w)

Here the button does the same thing as the print statement in the earlier example

theodox
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