[Bf-committers] Layer system

[David Bryant]

Finally!
One of the few that understands.Thanks.

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Matt Ebb" <matt at mke3.net>
To: "bf-blender developers" <bf-committers at blender.org>
Sent: Saturday, December 22, 2007 12:29 AM
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Layer system


> 
> On 22/12/2007, at 2:18 PM, Stephen Swaney wrote:
> 
>> On Sat, Dec 22, 2007 at 01:38:47PM +1100, Matt Ebb wrote:
>>>
>>> Erm, no, an object can most definitely be in more than one group.
>>
>> If you can put objects in muliple groups and you can put groups in
>> layers, then you essentially have an infinite number of layers  and
>> still have the simplicity of the current layer system as a top level  
>> of
>> organization..
> 
> No you don't, not at all, though being able to use the visibility/ 
> renderability flags for groups would go a long way to help this.
> 
> I think a lot of people commenting here don't see the limitations in  
> Blender's ancient layer system because for simple things, Blender  
> works just fine. Even to the extent of doing one task (i.e. modelling  
> or animation only) the system holds up ok, but as soon as you start  
> doing things that are more complex, in a production environment where  
> you need to manage the files containing all sorts of models,  
> animation, lights, render settings, the whole things gets so caught up  
> in spaghetti complexity, that it's a real pain.
> 
> One thing that really doesn't help the situation is that layers in  
> Blender are (ab)used for all sorts of only slightly related things. As  
> a method of organisation, a simplistic one-size-fits-all approach  
> breaks down when there are multiple things you want to organise for  
> different tasks.
> 
> For example, layers are used for;
> * Hiding and showing models, for example to hide unwanted 'trash'  
> stuff, or to use temporarily to hide high-poly objects to speed up  
> interactive display, or to hide away helper objects like armatures or  
> curve guides or force fields that may be getting in the way
> * Defining render layers, determining what objects will appear in  
> different image buffers in the compositor upon rendering.
> * Defining what lamps will affect what geometry ('layer' option)
> * Controlling the effect of particle systems/deflectors (this one is  
> utterly ridiculous, force fields will only affect particles systems on  
> the same layer, which swiftly ruins your organisation of different  
> systems/helpers, especially if you have multiple systems sharing force  
> fields)
> * And probably one or two other things I've forgotten too.
> 
> The trouble with this, is that these tasks often have logically  
> nothing to do with each other at all, and so the usage conflicts.  
> Defining objects that you want as a render pass image generally has  
> nothing to do with how you want to organise your scene to disable high  
> poly geometry in the view, but you're force to use the same system for  
> it all. It's like using the Dewey decimal system to organise both your  
> books and the species of the animal kingdom.
> 
> Currently the way to work around this mess is to split your object  
> layers up even more finely grained and do stupid tricks like putting  
> objects on multiple layers, not because it makes more sense to  
> organise it that way, but because you have to work around the system  
> to make it happy, and end up with something that's barely organised at  
> all. And of course doing all this stuff just uses more and more of the  
> hugely limiting number of 20 layers, which I run up against quite often.
> 
> Especially doing things like that when you have all sorts of  
> convoluted links and objects on multiple layers, it's very easy to  
> make mistakes and get lost in it all. It's very easy to forget that an  
> object is on multiple layers, and it can get cleared so easily with a  
> simple stroke of a muscle-memorised M->number key->Enter. And then you  
> find out after rendering for a few hours that you moved a particle  
> deflector to the wrong layer by accident while trying to work around  
> it all, and you have to re-render the shot again. It's all very  
> frustrating.
> 
> Anyway, I'm not sure if I have any real answers, though the whole  
> problem is a lot more complex of whether to use bitflags or linked  
> lists. Two things would probably help a lot:
> * Adding the toggles for view/select/render to groups
> * Adding an option for lamps to limit their effect to a certain group,  
> like the layer option.
> 
> cheers
> 
> Matt
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