[Bf-taskforce25] RNA-IPO

[Brecht Van Lommel]

Hi,

Maybe there is not much purpose in getting rid of the distinction now ..
I'm not and expert at the animation system nor the one who has to do all
the work. I'll write some more about how I think things might work in a
separate mail, which may or may not be practical.

On Wed, 2009-01-07 at 08:26 -0500, Roland Hess wrote:
> Actions are lists of channels, which are links to Ipo blocks together 
> with some flags for how that Ipo block is evaluated. So an Action is 
> like a grab bag full of Ipo blocks. It's not so much that there is a 
> distinction as that they are not even the same thing.

So there are a few levels here currently: NLA -> Action -> Ipo block ->
Ipo Curves. I'm not saying we should not allow that kind of hierarchy
for example, but rather wonder if there is much point in having a strict
distinction between them, and if it would not be more interesting to
permit a more flexible hierarchy.

> The stoopid part about Actions is that the channels are positively 
> linked to the Ipo block by a pointer, but only matched up with the bones 
> of any Object they animate are attached to through string comparisons 
> (strcmp(actionchannelname,posechannelname).)

This is an essential feature, it makes the action reusable. Not sure
what is stupid about it, how else would you do it? It does make things
like renaming bones more complicated, which is somewhat unavoidable when
you decouple things like this, you can't really know which files they
are lib linked in etc. Though compensation for such cases could be more
advanced. If the fact that it has to do many string comparisons is a
performance problem, that is just an implementation issue which can be
solved with hashing.

> And, while you can directly manipulate the location of keys along the 
> timeline, which in turn affects the linked Ipo curves, it can happen on 
> many at once and you cannot directly edit the curves in the Action 
> Editor. We still need both Action blocks and Ipo blocks as library data. 
> Neither are redundant.

I don't understand the explanation here, so maybe you are refering to
something else, but I'm not saying we should get rid of the Ipo editor?

Brecht.