[Bf-committers] new feature list for animation

[Michael Reimpell]

As I understand the current discussion about the animation system, the idea is 
to have a complete redesign. I will point out some problems with the current 
implementation that could be addressed by a new design.

There are some problems in the creation of armatures: There are two types of 
bone parenting, dotted parenting and direct parenting. Direct parenting 
merely adds the additional constraint that the head of the child is the tail 
of the parent. While it is possible to remove this constraint (i.e. convert 
direct parenting to dotted parenting) you can't add this constraint (at least 
not in an easy way). You also can't insert a bone between existing head and 
tail of other bones (FKey equivalent).

Actions can't be deleted, just unlinked. As one probably uses several 
different actions (e.g. as action actuators in the game engine) linking the 
actions does merely select the action for the 3D view to display.

The IPO curve editor uses quaternions for rotation keyframes. One should at 
least give the option to use axis-angle parameters. Axis-angle parameters are 
probably more intuitive to work with, e.g. it is easy to just change the 
angle of rotation when the rotation axis is fixed.

The order of transformation is confusing: If you move the mesh after you 
parented an armature to it, the animation gets disturbed. This prevents an 
armature to be used for several meshes simultaneously.

The BPy API does not give you access to the ipo curves with applied 
constraints (baked). Also a more clever bake algorithm that does not insert 
unnecessary key frames would be desirable.

Regards,
Michael