[Bf-committers] Animation editor context

[Daniel Salazar - 3Developer.com]

Hi, in animation editors is essential to display everything there is in the
scene, visibility not important. This for general re-timing tasks

Daniel Salazar
patazstudio.com


On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 2:49 AM, Lukas Tönne <lukas.toenne at googlemail.com>wrote:

> Currently the animation editor does not support node groups. This is
> because the animation editor filters any possible channel set based on
> the active context, i.e. mostly scene, world and the active object.
> This works fine for any data block that is uniquely associated to an
> object (i.e. you can get from object to ID block anim data
> unambiguously). Correct me if i'm wrong here, since i don't have a
> whole lot of animation experience :)
>
> The problem is that some data blocks might not necessarily have this
> kind of direct connection to objects (point in case: node groups). As
> long as a base node tree is reachable, one could simply list anim data
> for all the node groups in that node tree, but this could get pretty
> messy once groups inside groups come into play and the number of
> animated node groups increases.
>
> One possible solution could be to base the display of node animation
> data on the visible node editors, rather than the active object. I.e.
> instead of going along the object->material->node_tree path for shader
> nodes or scene->node_tree for compositor, the graph/dopesheet/nla
> editor would display channels for the currently visible node editors.
>
> Since the node editor has an explicit "active" node tree (either the
> base tree or some edited group), this would give much more control
> over the display of node animation data. After all it is not of much
> use to display animation data for a node tree without actually seeing
> the tree (or so it seems to me). I'd also like to point out that the
> upcoming node groups patch [1] supports node tree pinning, i.e. a node
> editor can then display a node tree independent of the current context
> and selection.
>
> Does this sound like a reasonable idea? Or are there design problems
> i'm overlooking?
>
> Regards,
> Lukas
>
>
> [1]
>
> https://www.gitorious.org/~lukastoenne/blenderprojects/blender-lukastoenne/commits/node-groups-upgrade
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