[Soc-2016-dev] Weekly Report #01, Layer Manager

[Julian Eisel]

Hi all,

So it has started! This is my report of the first week. You can also
find it on the wiki, formatting is a bit better there
(https://goo.gl/Ymm4OF).

Ton (my mentor) just found the time to review my layer manager UI
design doc this weekend. To get the design into a more final shape and
to get some face-to-face feedback from artists with production
experience, I'm going to visit the Blender Institute for a little
design sprint next week.
There are some issues to be solved still, but I personally think we're
almost there :)))

What I did this week:
Since UI design isn't completely done yet, I mostly experimented with
general features that shouldn't conflict heavily with further
decisions.

* Added an own Editor "Layer Manager" for now, this gives room for experiments.
* Added an initial code infrastructure for layer management and display.
* Added basic layer list drawing
* Added (initial?) support for selecting, adding, renaming and
grouping layers/layer-groups

Current screenshot: https://goo.gl/KkWplJ

While things started as experiments, I'm confident they're working out
quite well, so that I can mostly continue with what I have so far.

If you want to get an idea of what I'm going for, best look at:
* blenkernel/BKE_layer.h (https://goo.gl/3zOyqv)
* blenkernel/intern/layer.c (https://goo.gl/Yqhvn4)
* editors/space_layers/ (https://goo.gl/tHZdI8)

Next week:
* Come up with a more final UI design (design sprint at the BI)
* Start creating a relation between objects and layers (which they
don't have yet)
* Smaller changes to new code infrastructure to fix issues I found
* Communicate technical ideas with other devs (will try to finish my
technical design doc, but can't promise anything)

That's it, cheers!
- Julian -