[Soc-2012-dev] Precision Modelling Tools - Week 6 Progress Report

[Luke Frisken]

Wiki Version of Report:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kellpossible/progress#Week_6_Report

*What I did this week: *
This week has been a slightly painful experience of bug squashing. Vertex
snapping and Edge snapping are now back to what they were, but now using
the new snapping system. I'm almost glad that things went wrong when
porting them, because it's forced me to learn how they work a lot better
than if there had been no problem. I took breaks from debugging to talk to
people and nut out how the "multi snapping" will work in practice, and
created a wiki page about it, and a nice diagram.
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Kellpossible/multi-snap-design I'm
glad I did this, because before now it was kind of all "airy" "fairy", an
issue I didn't need to worry about too much until later. But now that
existing snapping options are almost all back it will soon be time to have
a crack at the new ideas.

*What's in store for next week? *
I'm getting the feeling (and hoping) that most of the exciting features of
this project are going to come in a rush, everything beforehand has been
careful designing and building of the foundations. This next week I've got
one more main "foundation" to work out and code, before the fun starts. The
way that the snapping system interacts with the rest of blender code is
somewhat still up in the air at the moment. For now I've got some simple
code linking it in just for testing purposes, but in its current form, it's
not using the snapping code in the way it was designed for. So, I have to
make some changes to transform_snap.c

As mentioned in the wiki page above, the snapping system will need to be
able to have some method of capturing mouse input, and drawing to the
screen, until the final snapping point is decided, by which time the
control can be handed back to the original code using it. In this case it
would be the transform operator. There would be a callback which allows the
transform to update to the realtime position of the snapping point as the
user moves the mouse. I've got plenty of questions about the best way to
achieve something like this, which I'll need to figure out some answers to
this weekend before I start trying to code it.

After this issue has been resolved, I'll go and implement parallel snapping
(which requires multiple clicks), and planar snapping. If that's all I
manage to get done this next week I'll be happy, but I also hope to make a
start on implementing multiple snapping.

*Roadblocks? Difficulties? *
Trouble getting in contact with mentor. Took longer than I expected to
solve and smooth all the issues with porting the existing snapping options
to the new system (corner cases, bugs and the like), but I've learned a lot
more about them in the process.
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