[Bf-taskforce25] UI Animation

[William Reynish]

Hi,

While defining the way Blender draws the panels and buttons on the  
screen, this may the time to make sure the system supports animated  
transitions.

Why use animation in the UI? Because if a button or panel jumps to a  
new position it is obtrusive, and the user must reorient him/herself,  
whereas the if a button or panel gracefully moves to a new position,  
the reorganization is clear, and the user can immediately find his/her  
way in new state.

Currently, Blender uses animation for panels opening and closing, but  
since the sense of buttons hierarchy is much stronger in 2.5 I think  
it is pretty important to allow for animations where buttons may  
appear or disappear.

Here are some example movies for demonstration:

http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/panel_openclose_anim.mov
http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/panel_content_anim.mov

To support this, I'm assuming the system would need to be able put  
buttons into 'blocks' that can then be animated using OpenGL?

Cheers

-William


On 9 Mar, 2009, at 7:13 PM, Brecht Van Lommel wrote:

>
> Hi,
>
> I made a To Do list for 2.5 technical issues to work on.
>
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Blender2.5/WinterCamp/TechnicalTodo
>
> Some more detailed ideas were written down at:
> http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Blender2.5/WinterCamp/TechnicalDesign
>
> Who will work on what isn't clear yet, I'll probably work on RNA/ 
> Context
> items, Ton on WM/Screen and Campbell on Python, as was already
> happening. Especially UI topics would be good to tackle sooner rather
> than later since that is the missing thing to get 2.5 to a somewhat
> usable state, and so that UI designers can get started.
>
> The design for generating UI's isn't fixed yet, it will be based on
> layout templates like "transform coordinates", "preview", "datablock
> browse", "row", "columns", etc. Not completely auto generated from RNA
> but specified on a fairly high level. We need to think of an API to
> create buttons as in these mockups (created by William), while still
> permitting working on multiple selected items for example:
>
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/2_5_mockups_01.png
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/2_5_mockups_02.png
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/2_5_mockups_03.png
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/2_5_mockups_04.png
> http://www.reynish.com/files/blender25/2_5_mockups_05.png
>
> Regarding RNA and Context stuff, it's challenging to keep this system
> understandable so I'll try to document implementation and usage  
> better,
> and ask for reviews on bf-taskforce25 .. to avoid me being the only  
> one
> who understands how it works internally. Diagrams and more detailed  
> docs
> will follow as I work out the design a bit better.
>
> Brecht.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bf-taskforce25 mailing list
> Bf-taskforce25 at blender.org
> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-taskforce25

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.blender.org/pipermail/bf-taskforce25/attachments/20090309/492c8673/attachment.htm