[Bf-funboard] monkeyboi's UI Proposals

[David Cuny]

I was looking at monkeyboi's UI proposals again, and thought I'd make a few 
comments.

I *really* like the suggestions that he makes for the morph targets. There is 
one option that I don't see in his proposal: the ability to create a new key 
from a current pose. Perhaps I'm misunderstanding something? For example, you 
might have sliders for curling each finger on a hand, and want to build a new 
morph to control *all* the fingers at one time.

Another option I'm not sure I see the creation of 'mirrored' morphs. That is, 
the ability to convert a left hand morph into a right hand morph. It might 
already exist in the menu; I didn't look too hard.

In the suggestion of having popups stay open why not add a 'Cancel' option as 
well? That way, it behaves like most newbies expect a dialog to behave. 
Cancelling with the 'Esc' key is pretty much the expected behavior, so I 
agree there as well.

Wandering off topic, I thought I'd point out the Animanium IK system 
(http://www.animanium.com/, although the Japanese site at 
http://www.sega.co.jp/animanium/ is much more useful).

It uses a 'pin and drag' method, where you can dynamically lock and unlock 
joints in the IK chain. It was apparently enough to impress people at 
SIGGRAPH, because they picked up a Technological Innovation Special Award for 
it. It looks quite cool, but apparently there are still a lot of bugs in it 
and the release has been delayed for a number of months. 

However, I've seen it successfully implemented in Art of Illusion 
(http://aoi.sf.net) using traditional CCD with a reasonable response time. It 
looks like it would be a nifty thing to have in Blender.

Anyhoo, monkeyboi's proposals look great, and I love the work that's been done 
on 2.3.

-- David Cuny