[Soc-2016-dev] Weekly Report #3, UV-Tools

[Phil Gosch]

Report can also be found here, including images: 
https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:SaphireS/gsoc2016/reports#Report_.233_for_UV-Tools:

What I did this week:

* Finished the "Select Shortest Path" operator for UVs. While the 
implementation of the path computation itself was rather 
straightforward, some code refactoring in parametrizer.c had to be made 
to make it work. Parametrizer uses triangles for faces, so I had to tag 
diagonal edges of quads to counter "face-stepping" behaviour for 
example. I included the otion to use the topological distance, similar 
to the bmesh operator. If checked the minimum number of steps is used 
instead of the minimum spatial distances. An animated .gif can be found 
here: [1]

* I implemented a "Scale To Bounds" operator for UV islands. This is 
also known as "Normalize UVs" in other software packages. I has the 
following options:
** Keep aspect ratio: If checked the aspect ratio of the selected uv 
islands is preserved
** Individual: If checked the individual uv islands are all scaled to 
fit the bounds, otherwise the selections are scaled as a whole
An animated .gif can be found here: [2]

* I made incremental snapping in UV editor more precise, previously only 
8 snapping steps (per axis) were the default, I doubled that amount. 
Also while holding shift the snapping interval is halved again for even 
greater precision. This was requested by a few people at blenderartists. [3]

* Looked into hiding of elements and researched UV scripts/addons which 
could be useful. But in the end my mentor and I decided I should start 
with packing improvements rather sooner than later and reschedule the 
other tasks.

What I plan on doing next week:

* Shortly evaluate amount of work for hiding improvements and rip uvs 
operator.

* Analyse current rectangle based bin-packing (Pack Islands) and how 
much of it can be reused for new packing algorithm

* Start implementing basics and helper functions of packing according to 
the paper. [4]

* Testing, bugfixing and getting to know more of the code

Questions:

I discovered that MSVC2013 isn't displaying all warnings and even 
compiles although there are errors in the code (I forgot to add a 
parameter to the declaration of a function, still compiled fine). 
Anybody has an idea how to fix this? I'd like to somehow know if my 
branch doesn't compile for others ;)

[1] https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/0/07/Shortest_path.gif

[2] https://wiki.blender.org/uploads/5/5f/Scale_bounds.gif

[3] 
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?397599-GSOC-2016-UV-Tools&p=3056914&viewfull=1#post3056914

[4] 
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S1678-58782008000300005


-- 
pixel-pusher at saphirestudio.at