[Bf-animsys] Visualisation Matters

[William Reynish]

Hi Joshua,

Interesting proposal. One of the annoyances of animation in 2.49 was  
that these useful visualization options were limited to just bones -  
how about enabling these on all objects in 2.5? Being able to directly  
adjust the path of the camera, for example, would be very useful. In  
fact I hope most of the bone-only features can become more global  
(quaternion rotations, for example).


On 12 Aug, 2009, at 2:37 PM, Joshua Leung wrote:

> Hi all,
>
> Once again, it's that time of the year when I start looking into  
> doing another incremental round of improvements on the visualisation  
> features - i.e. ghosting and paths in particular.
>
> At the time of writing, there are two big "holy grails" that would  
> be nice to have:
> 1) ghosting of the actual meshes deformed by the armatures, and

IMHO this could be useful in some situations, but most of the time the  
output would probably be too messy to be useful. Already with armature  
ghosting it's often all but impossible to see what's going on, though  
it's not so bad when only ghosting one bone at a time. From where I  
stand this is honestly not that interesting a feature, but this is:

> 2) editing of the path verts

This would be simply incredible. This would be fantastically useful,  
esp if you could edit bezier path curves in 3D. I'm sure it's not easy  
though. I'd definitely advocate to not introduce yet another mode, and  
let the user just select curve points and translate them. You are  
right that you'd only want to tweak one or a few bones at a time, but  
you could instead have a toggle for each bone to display its animation  
curve on or off. I don't follow what the problem would be of letting  
this be editable within pose mode (or even object mode for objects?).  
What ' established expectations' are violated?

Cheers,

-William

> 2) Editing Paths:
> There are two big obstacles here: figuring out how to map path edits  
> to transforms (rotations vs scaling vs location), and how to allow  
> the user to start editing the path vertices.
>
> The first issue is relatively trivial, and is really just a matter  
> of further investigation I guess.
>
> However, I need some suggestions for the second problem. As I  
> currently see it, most people would prefer to be able to just click  
> on some path vertex and then move it by simply dragging, all without  
> having to go into any special sub-modes or so. There are several  
> disdvantages of this, namely that it practically violates many of  
> the established expectations of how users usually expect to be able  
> to interact with elements with editable vertices in Blender  
> (selection + transform tools are limited). Also, this would  
> complicate pose-mode event handling in particular, since we'd have  
> to deal with priority of bones vs curve verts too...
>
> However, if we went with the "separate mode" approach, it becomes a  
> bit more frustrating to try and edit the paths of a few bones,  
> especially if you wanted to edit the paths of different bones but  
> didn't want to have to stop and think which ones you'd like to  
> isolate for editing. Just clarifying that a bit, I'm thinking that  
> with this separate mode, you'd select one or more bones with some  
> paths, enter the mode, and only be able to tweak the path vertices  
> of the bones selected when entering the mode. Then, when those paths  
> were tweaked ok, you could exit the mode, and continue editing other  
> parts. This might be an acceptable compromise, given that when  
> editing a path, I'm assuming that you're going to only concentrate  
> on the motion of a few limbs/controls at a time.