[Bf-committers] Restoring 2.49 Feature: Groups in Add menu

[W. Nelson]

Yes, Add>Group is in addition to the "Add>Group Instance" item at the bottom of the Add menu and is intended to help manage linked libraries from the Add menu as seen in the reference video.  So currently the new Add>Group menu item brings up the same Group Instance menu code in addition to a library custom group place holder.


Ideally as discussed with others, the library custom groups from this menu can be organized and nested in composition workflow groups so to say and as in the reference video.  These are different groups than actual ctrl-g grouping.  These groups, or the presentation of these custom organized groups can therefore be added very quickly while in a scene composition workflow.  This is distinctly different than grouping for modeling purposes therefor different in usage than
 the Group Instance menu item.

Yes again, I am looking at the Outliner and how an addon for that would work with the Add menu.  Other work is being done on the Outliner so I figured a streamlined Add menu modification with a simple panel to manage the custom nesting would be a good start and then eventually working it to play nice with the other goals for the Outliner.

This workflow is especially useful in scenes with lots of repetitive object group composition work or large scale scenes such as a landscape or a city greeble.  This type of workflow is frequently in production studio type settings.

Thanks for the excellent input,
JTa






________________________________
 From: Brecht Van Lommel <brechtvanlommel at pandora.be>
To: W. Nelson <indigitalspace at yahoo.com>; bf-blender developers <bf-committers at blender.org> 
Sent: Monday, May 27, 2013 3:54 AM
Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Restoring 2.49 Feature: Groups in Add menu
 

Probably the place would be
release/scripts/startup/bl_operators/object.py or a new group.py.

However there is already a "Group Instance" item in the Add menu? So I
guess this is about the feature of adding groups from other libraries
directly form the menu. This was part of a bigger change that also
added library linking functionality to the outliner. Probably that
could be implemented as a python addon, but for best
 integration
that's really a bigger feature that needs to be implemented in C.

On Mon, May 27, 2013 at 5:13 AM, W. Nelson <indigitalspace at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Feedback is requested on restoring the 2.49 feature of Groups in the Add menu.
>
> It has been suggested that this feature can be implemented solely in bpy
> without altering the C code.  From a coding standpoint, does anyone have
>  any suggestions or devs have a preference on where to add the bpy
> code?  There was not a clear place in the existing scripts folder to put
>  this type of code.
>
> It seemed like all the items in the Add menu
> in scripts>startup>bl_ui>space_info.py were referencing
> existing operators in the C code.  So are there any suggestions on where
>  to add the
 code that will populate the menu from the groups and links
> operators?
>
> Thanks! JTa
>
> Thread link:
> http://www.blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?293583-Restoring-2-49-Feature-Groups-in-Add-menu
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