[tuhopuu-devel] Markers stuff

[Matt Ebb]

On 6 Mar 2005, at 6:45 AM, Jiri Hnidek wrote:
>
> Log:
>   - some other tweak of markers ... I hope, that Matt will not kill me 
> :-)

Nah, it's too cold up there at this time of year :)

>   - markers can be selected with RMB now
>   - selected markers can be removed with Del or X key
>   - you can deselect/select all markers with A key
>   - first selected marker will be renamed
>   - Shift-A popups window with "Time Value"

This is good stuff, thanks! Though I'm not sure about the Shift A 
hotkey for the time value - we could just make it 'T' or something? Any 
reason why that was chosen? This extra stuff is not in the menus either 
- I'll try and get on to that.

>   - I hope, that nearbyint is available at all platforms.

It works fine here on OS X.

> I forgot mntion two things:
> 1) I use some existing icon for selected marker. I know, it isn't 
> perfect solution. I hope, that Matt will commit blenderbutton file as 
> soon as possible

Fixed! Sorry about that.

> 2) Do you think, that moving (scaling) and duplicating of markers 
> could be usefull?

Moving could be, yes. Especially for when you're dropping markers 
during animation playback, it may not be accurate, so moving would make 
it easier to tweak this. Or if you have markers already there as a 
guide, but you want to change the timing, it might help to be able to 
move these easily. Scaling, I'm not so sure about, and duplicating I 
think not. It's important to always keep in mind what the actual usage 
is. Sure, it's possible to add all sorts of functionality that we can 
think of, but that doesn't mean we should :) Particularly for 
duplication, it's hard to see how that helps a user in the goal of 
marking points in the timeline to visualise and navigate between (and 
if so, whether it's worth the increase in complexity). For this, it 
would seem just as easy to place a new marker down where it's needed.

I probably seem to be harping on about this a lot lately, but this (and 
IMO, Blender in a wider scope) should be kept as simple, and 
streamlined as possible! Rather than more functionality, we should be 
thinking about better, and more elegant functionality, that allows the 
job to get done, with minimal fuss and complexity.

Having said that, people of course have their own specific requests. 
Rather than including everything and bloating things even further, it 
would be good if somehow the markers could be made accessible to Python 
(though mainly just access to what's already in the Blender UI - adding 
markers, naming them, removing them, etc.) This way, the core Blender 
can be kept lean, but people can also make their own functionality if 
they have more specialised needs. I can think of a few areas in which 
this could be useful, like a dynamics script adding markers at each 
collision so you can time extra visual or sound effects, or perhaps 
adding naming markers with phonemes in a lip sync script.

On 6 Mar 2005, at 6:31 AM, Gabriel Beloin wrote:

> There is something usefull to be done with these markers... if for 
> example we could use it to triger something else, like a python script 
> for example.

This sounds a lot like frame actions in Flash, but I'm not so sure how 
useful this would be for something non-interactive. In any case, if 
there was Python access, you could write your own scriptlinks that did 
something like:

if currentframe.marker.name == "blah"
	do_something()

that checked for the presence of the marker, each frame. There wouldn't 
need to be any extra stuff in Blender itself, that way.


Ooh, what a ramble.

Cheers,

Matt
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