djCamera.mel
I have been working on preproduction for a tvc I am involved in. This involves using maya to build scale models of the shoot location and planning out the camera moves and lens angles and such.
I like working with a "Camera and Aim" type setup where a camera can be controlled by its position and an "aim" point, but I still like to be able to add (usually small amounts of) pan, tilt and roll to the camera. This is easy to do in maya by grouping the camera under a new transform node and aim-constraining the transform to a locator. Then the camera can still be rotated using its local transform.
I needed many cameras set up this way, and wanted an easy consistent way to do it so I wrote a simple mel script called djCamera.mel The script hooks up the constraint and does the grouping, but it also changes the camera rotation order to zxy and provides extra attributes on the constrained transform called pan, tilt and roll. The order of rotation change allows me to roll the camera and not have it thrown off axis by the pan or tilt.
The mel script is still in a very basic form. If I get some time in the future, I would like to make a GUI that would enable the creation options to be presented in a more interactive way - instead of them being hard coded like they are at the moment.