[Bf-committers] looking for advice

[Charles Wardlaw]

Hi everyone,

I've already spoken to Ton and Aligorith about this; I've been pointed now
towards Brecht, but I thought I'd ask everyone generally.

I'm trying to get Blender adopted as an end-to-end tool at my studio, and
not just as a part of the pipeline (which it already is for modeling / UVing
/ texturing).  The UI is the major complaint that I get back, but after
showing a few of the guys how much more quickly anyone can model in Blender
compared to Maya they shut up pretty quickly on that front; besides, from
what I've seen of the 2.5 builds thus far, the UI will be even more
configurable than Maya's with the next release. And it seems that Euler
curves have made it into the animation system -- bravo!

The only reason at the moment we haven't fully pushed Blender into testing
is because of issues with undo on animated object and on linked characters.
I submitted a bug report on the issue (#18433) and Ton said that while
people are aware of the issues, there aren't enough coders to tackle them.
The short of the problems: undo recalculates from keys, so if you don't use
autokey it often undoes well past the last change.  The other side of it is
that linked characters that have been scaled will often explode when you
reload the file.  I can demonstrate this with the BBB bird rig if anyone's
interested.

Now, I'd like to get this sorted.  They both seem to be related to the same
issue, that values are not getting cached properly and are then re-generated
based on a set of rules that don't adhere to what the user expects.  My
options at the moment are either coding fixes myself (which can't happen
until at least October, with my current schedule) or putting up some money
as a bounty for these fixes.  If I can show a plan of attack I might be able
to convince the boss to throw money at a developer too, but that's not a
promise I can make at the moment.  I know he's interested in Blender for
smaller projects because its ability to rapidly create content and its price
tag.

An idea that both Aligorith and I had was to add a cache system to the
animation curves so that when you don't autokey, the cache fills up and
holds values that don't get saved with the Blend file but that work with
undo.  This is a great idea but won't solve problems on unkeyed objects in
references.  However, caching at the RNA level would-- if RNA channels for
translate / rotate / scale / user data had similar caches, undo values could
be pulled from caches as well.

So what I'm really looking for is advice.  What's the best way to start
tackling this issue?  Am I understanding what's actually wrong?  Will these
fixes require a massive rewrite?  Are there any developers with time who
wouldn't mind getting paid to sort this stuff out?  Preferably someone who
lives in Toronto, Canada, but naturally I'd be flexible on that.

Anyway, thanks in advance,
~ Charles