[Soc-2011-dev] Weekly Status Report 6 - 1 July - AnimSys Polish

[Joshua Leung]

Hi all,

1) This week
Finished bulk of refactoring work on Animation Channels code. Some highlights:
- Node animation is now displayed in Animation Editors
- Solved many of the problems related to duplication of filtering
logic in several places as the original code outgrew it's original
intentions. Most notably the code has now been moved away from the old
"check then do" style, which was causing most of the problems.
- Only selected channels option in Timeline now works as expected in
Pose Mode, where it will now only show the keyframes of selected bones
instead of just the active object. This was requested during Durian,
but needed some of the work done recently to make it easy to do.

Started working on some visual tweaks to streamline the UI a bit in
response to user feedback from the polls I've put up.
- Datablock filters are now hidden behind a toggle now to save space,
since most people weren't actively using them. Reshuffled other
filtering options too to better reflect their importance.
- Changed the icon for toggling Graph Editor curve visibility from
checkbox to eye. As a consequence of this, I've also changed the icon
used for muting, which is now the ubiquitous speaker often used for
this purpose.
- Added new icons for KeyingSets and Drivers
- Cleaned up some places where some text used was just contributing to
clutter, making it harder to scan for stuff - notably NLA strips,
Active Action tracks in NLA channel-list, struct-names for ID-data in
F-Curve names (but left those used for non-ID data there still)

Worked on implementing support for managing animation data (especially
the active action) in the Outliner. It's now possible to unlink and
make single-user the active action for datablocks.

Made editing driver settings update drivers automatically more often
instead of needing to use the "Update Dependencies" button. Turned out
to be a simple one-liner fix, though getting some of the other
properties here to update that well may be more difficult.

2) Next Week
Tie up loose ends with the animation channel filtering core.
- I think biggest issues here are just reviewing the behaviour of
visibility and/or settings toggling stuff, which may need a fairly
decent recode.
- Depending on how things go, I may also look into providing Py/RNA
access to this system, since I've noticed people having some troubles
with this.

Also, I've started preparing a little bit of documentation/guide on
this, which I hope will be useful reference on this stuff. Should be
done in next few days.

FSamples "Baking" API
- I've noticed in a few other SoC projects that extensive use of
frame-by-frame animation baking was being used (notably
mocap/tracking). Keyframes aren't optimised for this, while the
half-finished FSamples system is. So, I'm probably going to prioritize
starting work on this sooner now. In due course I'll probably be
soliciting feedback on the needs for "baking api's" from these
projects.

Other stuff
- Implement some more fancy animation management stuff for the
Outliner. Particularly changing/setting actions.
- Look into a RMB menu for Anim Editors - action management and
renaming functionality in particular.
- Look into a "compact" mode for NLA - for use when trying to retime a
large number of strips
- Some small tools + bugfixes to make some tasks easier (to be
revealed in due course)
- Come up with some solutions for issues raised in the feedback
received so far. In particular, the channel grouping issue.