[Bf-committers] Problems with time in do_nla()

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Blender's time system is a nightmare still! I've never had time to make  
that nice and clean during the animation refactor.

Nevertheless, a frame is supposed to be a short (or int), it's the  
image being rendered you know! There's api calls in blender to convert  
them to float, like system_time().
But there's a lot of confusement going on... like for object  
startframes, motion blur, time-mapping, etc.

The do_all_actions() call could just get a float frame input yes, but  
that's probably better todo when the bigger picture gets solved.

-Ton-


On 4 Jan, 2006, at 20:38, Roland Hess wrote:

> In trying to get Action Baking working properly (nice, optimized  
> keying), I've run across some interesting traits of Blender's time  
> system, and the NLA stride bone option, in particular.
>
> First, I'm not sure why I never realized it, but Blender's global  
> current frame variable is a short integer. Why it is not a float, I do  
> not understand. It seems that a lot of the worries about fractional  
> frames for things like motion blur, etc., would go away if someone  
> took on the daunting task of converting it to a float variable. Of  
> course, there's probably a very good reason that I'm missing, but at  
> the moment, I don't get it.
>
> A problem that I've run across, and I invite anyone familiar with the  
> NLA Stride Bone code to comment, is that when using a StrideBone on a  
> path, the full range of the action is never used. Upon using a  
> modified compile of Blender, I had it give me the Action frame number  
> that is was using at each stage during NLA, and, depending on the  
> length of the Action, the length of the Stride, etc., the StrideBone  
> feature would start the Action at various places: frame 3.37, frame  
> 7.856, etc., but not frame 1, where it ought to start.
>
> I've been tracing the code by hand, trying to figure out exactly where  
> things begin to get screwy, and I've run it down to the calculation of  
> the ctime value, before it gets converted into striptime. Frame 1 of a  
> strip with StrideBone should return frame 1 of the associated Action;  
> likewise, strip frames that are a multiple of the number of repeats of  
> the cycle (+1, of course) should return 1 for their action frame. But  
> they don't.
>
> Comments or clarifications?
>
> --  
> Roland Hess - harkyman
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>
------------------------------------------------------------------------ 
--
Ton Roosendaal  Blender Foundation ton at blender.org  
http://www.blender.org