[Bf-funboard] normalize visual display of curves in graph editor?

[Bassam Kurdali]

Yup, exactly, the Y scale on the graph editor.

There's probably some design decisions to make such as:

a- normalize different types (rotations-euler/rotation_quats/location)
to each other or:
aa- normalize all the curves based on their maximum/minimum?

b- static vs. dynamic (i.e. click normalize and it does it once, or
continuously does it) the former could get 'stale' after adding a bunch
of keyframes, the latter could be confusing as you are working.

c- consider the whole extent of the curves in time, or just the visible
time?

etc.

I'd lean towards it being curve-type agnostic, 'static' in that it does
the normalize once each time you toggle it on, and taking the entire
time range into account. 

There's also probably other corner cases, studying pros and cons in
other software, etc. that could be done. All of which makes it a good
topic for funboard ;)



On Mon, 2013-07-08 at 15:58 -0700, David Jeske wrote:
> Ohh wait... You are not talking about the spline handles... You are
> talking about the y-scale right?
> 
> If so, I already have that on my hit list of things to look at.
> 
> sent via mobile
> 
> On Jul 8, 2013 9:02 AM, "Bassam Kurdali" <bassam at urchn.org> wrote:
>         Hey!
>         Since David has been working on the bezier handles in the
>         graph editor,
>         I thought of a usability enhancement that could make life a
>         bit easier
>         for animators in the same editor.
>         
>         This is a feature that preexists in the 'other' 3D animation
>         software.
>         
>         Basically, when you have lots of curves in the editor
>         (location rotation
>         and scale) they get displayed at their 'actual' values,
>         meaning that
>         often they are far apart from each other. This means a lot of
>         scrolling
>         up and down, annoying when trying to move a bunch of keys
>         together.
>         
>         In older versions of blender, there was a hardcoded (and
>         confusing)
>         factor of 10 in the rotation curves, to help with this.
>         
>         What I'm proposing is toggle, maybe in the View menu or the
>         header, to
>         normalize curves to the same visual range based on their
>         maximums and
>         minimums. This would only affect the drawing, not the values,
>         and help
>         with selection of multiple curves.
>         
>         This might be more complicated than it seems at first glance,
>         so I'm
>         putting it up for discussion.
>         
>         cheers,
>         Bassam
>         
>         
>