[Soc-2016-dev] Weekly Report #4, UV-Tools

[Phil Gosch]

Hey,

I'm sending my report one day early since I won't be available for the 
rest of the week.

Report #4 for UV-Tools:

What I did this week:

* "Proper" hiding for UVs!

It was not possible to hide UV elements without altering the mesh 
selection state, which many users complained about. I implemented "real" 
hiding for UVs (the mesh selection in 3D view stays the same), using the 
good old H/Alt+H shortcuts. Hidden islands are not taken into account by 
most UV operators (this needs user testing, I may missed one) except 
unwrapping operators, which automatically un-hide all affected UVs to 
avoid user confusion.

There's one thing my mentor and I are unsure about and we need user 
feedback: Should we keep the "old" hiding behaviour as seperate 
operators (they basically just de-select parts of the mesh in 3d view) 
or can we savely remove that behaviour? I know from myself I never used 
it in all those years, but maybe there are some good usecases I'm not 
aware of? (Be aware that that behaviour is replicable with "new" hiding 
if Sync Selection is active!)

I provided a win build for users to test here: [1]

* Design the operator and decide on implementation details for 
bin-packing ("Pack Islands") improvements. Since this is a large task 
which likely will take some time without visible progress I preferred to 
have a written outline of the required work and subtasks, which can be 
found here: [2]

What I plan on doing next week:

*Prepare/Do midterm evaluation!

* Start coding the implementation of the new packing algorithm, the 
modal operator for it and all the helper and utility function required 
for it.

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

Questions:

We still haven't found a solution for the MSVC compiler question from 
last week.
Also feedback on the removal of "legacy" hiding behaviour would be 
appreciated (see above for details).

  [1] 
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?397599-GSOC-2016-UV-Tools&p=3063892&viewfull=1#post3063892
  [2] https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:SaphireS/gsoc2016/Packing

-- 
pixel-pusher at saphirestudio.at