[Bf-committers] Animation regression, quaternion normalization

[Nathan Vegdahl]

Hi Brecht,
You are right that it appears there are a lot of releases with this
regression!  I'm not sure how I didn't notice before.  Guess I wasn't
animating anything with large rotations.

It appears the regression was introduced in version 2.56.  Versions
2.55 and earlier behave as desired.

2.4x and earlier _do_ auto-normalize (I just tested).  In the 2.4x
series quats are displayed as eulers in the n-panel, so you have to
set keyframes and look at the values of the keys in the Ipo editor to
see the actual quat values.  Try, for example, keying a bone unrotated
on frame 1, then rotated 180 degrees on frame 21.  On frame eleven
it's clear that the values given by the Ipo curves are not normalized.
 However, if you move to frame 11 and set a key, the inserted keys are
normalized.

This is a highly desirable behavior, because it keeps quaternion
values from drifting and causing rotation speed issues with
interpolation.

Perhaps we could just normalize quaternion values upon inserting
keyframes?  That is the primary use-case here.

--Nathan


On Fri, Feb 24, 2012 at 7:51 AM, Brecht Van Lommel
<brechtvanlommel at pandora.be> wrote:
> Hi Nathan,
>
> I tried manually typing in non-normalized values in the N key
> transform panel in the 3d view, and rotating objects/bones after that
> with transform, but could not see it auto-normalize the values in any
> version I tested (2.49, 2.57, 2.60, 2.62).
>
> Probably I'm misunderstanding something, but I can't find any traces
> of this feature.
>
> Brecht.
>
> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 11:03 PM, Nathan Vegdahl <cessen at cessen.com> wrote:
>> Hi guys, I wrote to the list about this before but received no response.
>>
>> I don't know when this was changed, but quaternion rotations for
>> objects and bones in Blender are no longer auto-normalized for the
>> user.  I am frustrated that a release (2.62) made it out the door with
>> this being the case, as it substantially harms the practicality of
>> animating with quaternions.  It is not "incorrect" behavior per se, so
>> I am hesitant to file a bug report.  But it is something that needs to
>> be changed.
>>
>> I think we either need to revert behavior back to how it was before
>> (quaternions being auto-normalized in the transform panel), or find
>> another solution.  But as things are right now, quaternions are
>> impractical to animate with in many circumstances (especially doing
>> blocking on characters involving large rotations).  I will be happy to
>> provide a technical explanation of why that is the case, but at the
>> moment I am swamped trying to finish my rigging DVD.
>>
>> I just want to make sure this doesn't slip into the next release as
>> well!  It is a serious regression.
>>
>> --Nathan
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