[Bf-funboard] monkeyboi's UI Proposals
David Cuny
bf-funboard@blender.org
Mon, 17 Nov 2003 03:00:00 -0800
I was looking at monkeyboi's UI proposals again, and thought I'd make a few
comments.
I *really* like the suggestions that he makes for the morph targets. There is
one option that I don't see in his proposal: the ability to create a new key
from a current pose. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something? For example, you
might have sliders for curling each finger on a hand, and want to build a new
morph to control *all* the fingers at one time.
Another option I'm not sure I see the creation of 'mirrored' morphs. That is,
the ability to convert a left hand morph into a right hand morph. It might
already exist in the menu; I didn't look too hard.
In the suggestion of having popups stay open why not add a 'Cancel' option as
well? That way, it behaves like most newbies expect a dialog to behave.
Cancelling with the 'Esc' key is pretty much the expected behavior, so I
agree there as well.
Wandering off topic, I thought I'd point out the Animanium IK system
(http://www.animanium.com/, although the Japanese site at
http://www.sega.co.jp/animanium/ is much more useful).
It uses a 'pin and drag' method, where you can dynamically lock and unlock
joints in the IK chain. It was apparently enough to impress people at
SIGGRAPH, because they picked up a Technological Innovation Special Award for
it. It looks quite cool, but apparently there are still a lot of bugs in it
and the release has been delayed for a number of months.
However, I've seen it successfully implemented in Art of Illusion
(http://aoi.sf.net) using traditional CCD with a reasonable response time. It
looks like it would be a nifty thing to have in Blender.
Anyhoo, monkeyboi's proposals look great, and I love the work that's been done
on 2.3.
-- David Cuny