[Bf-committers] RE: constraints

[Martin Poirier]

> I feel the current parenting system has lost it's
> 'meaning'. Rather than
> just being used for transformations, where the idea
> of 'parent' makes sense
> (child inheriting transformations from a parent),
> parent has become muddied
> up with all sorts of things like dupliverts, path
> following and so on which
> is using it more for a 'one-way link', rather than
> as something used to
> inherit properties from another object.

Agreed, and this should further be extended to
deformations object, so you could effectivly have an
Armature AND a Lattice deforming a mesh (muscle
bulging anyone?).

> Additionally, by separating things out into
> constraints, you would get
> things like a general 'constrain to path'
> constraint, which would then make
> it very easy to (eg.) constrain an object to two
> different paths and
> change/animate the influences of the constraints
> (cars changing lanes?
> skateboards jumping over objects and landing back
> down on the pre-defined
> path's route?)

Talking about Constraint To Path, I've been looking a
bit into that, it will most likely be the next
constraint that I try to tackle.

> You could even get tricky and instead of just 'copy'
> or 'inherit'
> transformations, you also could include nifty things
> like 'Add Location',
> 'Subtract Location', 'Multiply Location', 'Mirror
> Location' or even more
> complicated things like constraining an object
> within (or outside) another
> object's bounding box, and so on.

All those should be bundled as one Location generic
constraint with multiple settings IMHO, but I do get
your point.
Combining a Add Loc, Add Rot and Add Size constraint
together would effectivly make a parent constraint.

> Food for thought :)

indeed indeed

Martin

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