Append ideas Re: [Bf-funboard] LIBRARY of more primitives

Luke Wenke bf-funboard@blender.org
Tue, 13 Jan 2004 00:43:49 +1000


I think the append function is about just as fast....
Basically you use the append hotkey (shift-F1) then find the thing you want
(you can use the mousewheel and home/pageup/pagedown/end to speed it up) and
press enter or "Load Library" when it is highlighted.
My suggestion is that while selecting something to append, if you press a
letter (or number? or valid filename characters such as _ - ~ space, etc?
[that is probably dependent on the OS]) on its own, it will go to the next
item in the list that begins with that letter/number (assuming there is
one). Once it has reached the last item of that letter/number and you press
it again, it jumps to the first item with that letter/number.
Anyway, if you for example, currently appended an object called
"DogSkeleton" to your current document, if you go to append again, it will
begin in the objects category, with "DogSkeleton" chosen... so it is easy to
re-append the same item, or you can go to other things in that same category
(object). If the last appended item was in another category (e.g. "Text")
then if you go to append again, it will begin in the Text category. I think
that is a good idea.
Another suggestion is that there could be tabs or icons or a dropdown menu
to choose the item category (e.g. object, mesh, ipo, etc). It would make it
quicker to change categories or at least make it more intuitive for new
users to learn.
I also think you should be able to append multiple items at once.... so that
you can import a whole character at once - that might have a skeleton, a
body, eyelids, eyeballs, and an empty which is where the eyes focus on. This
could at least be done manually, or there could even be groups that items
can be organised into so it is easy to just append the whole group. (Those
groups would probably be different to other kinds of groups in blender
though...)
The problem with importing parts of a character separately is that it might
usually reuse the same materials, but it creates separate copies of the
materials for each object. And the parenting/tracking/constraint/etc
relationships are forgotten I think. So at the moment there is quite a bit
of work to get the bits of a newly appended character to work together again
properly.
- Luke.

----- Original Message ----- 
> But if you you could make your own custom tool box menu for this sort
> of thing would be nice. Instead of appending into a file to get
> something you could just save your own model into the tool box to use
> later. In any file. Much faster and cleaner. As finding anything in an
> append file takes alot of time poking around.