This commit is an experiment exploring the relationship between the action
management buttons (i.e. action selector + pushdown/stash, and soon a few others)
and the filtering stuff (i.e. summary, only selected, etc.)
The old ordering meant that the filtering stuff was consistently in the same
place beside the mode selector, meaning that the order was "common stuff, then
editor specific stuff", this was not that great on smaller windows, where there
important stuff was often out of view.
This new order places greater emphasis on the parts which are likely to be more
important. It also allows us to have a better hierarchy/flow; this is especially
because we'll soon introduce a way to specify which datablock "level" the
action comes from, so going from "level -> action -> filters within action" will
make more sense.
This commit modifies the "New Action" operator to always stash the old action
before it creates a new one. As a result, the old active action will now have
a proper user of sorts after the new one is created, preventing previously
created actions from being lost.
Now that the New operator does this, it can be used for the Action Editor header AND
NLA Editor (Animation Data Panel -> Active Action) again. The "stash and create"
operator is somewhat redundant at this point as a result.
In constrast to the old "new" operator, this operator will stash the existing action
in the stack to prevent it from being lost. This situation isn't totally ideal yet,
since the NLA Editor still calls the old method.
I'm still not sure which version is better, but I suspect that with the labels,
this might help users figure this out more than if they were just unlabelled
icon buttons...
This operator (the snowflake icon, beside the pushdown button on the Action Editor
header) adds the currently active action to the NLA stack in a muted track, then
creates + loads a new action ready to be populated with new keyframes.
Since the NLA is being used to hang on to all the actions here, no actions are
getting lost.
Usage Notes (there will be some additional tweaks to make this nicer):
* To preview different actions that have been "stashed", simply click the "Solo"
toggle for the track containing the action in question. Playing back the NLA will
now show the stashed track
* To edit a previously stashed action - simply enter tweakmode on it in the NLA
while the "Solo" toggle is enabled.
Todo:
* Add some more operators here to polish up the Action <-> NLA bridge to make the
layered and stash workflows smoother. Examples include some tools to easily
switch between the different actions layers in the stack, as well as making it
easier to get out of tweakmode (and sync up the action lengths)
* Review and cleanup the behaviour of the "new" operator here to avoid the old
problems that users were running into
* After the next release - Implement the full Action Libraries functionality, with
ways to bridge the stashed strips over to a full-blown library.
This commit exposes the "Push Down" button/functionality found in the NLA Editor
to the Action Editor, so that actions can be added NLA Stack from here too. The
main point of this for now is to make the whole layered-animation workflow nicer
more efficient, but not requiring the second editor be visible in common cases.
It also conveniently sets things up for the next few changes (already hinted at
here)...
For now, did most of the changes in menu entries (i.e. py space UI scripts).
Note we do not get 100% same results as previously, but current situation is
globally better than previous one, though the whole system to retrieve shortcuts
remains a bit weak...
and graph editor.
This was a tricky commit that was not so straightforward to make work.
The information for bones is not easy to come by in the animation curves,
however we do have some string manipulation tricks to make it happen.
Testing in gooseberry worked for the rigs there, commiting to master now
This merge-commit brings in a number of new features and workflow/UI improvements for
working with Grease Pencil. While these were originally targetted at improving
the workflow for creating 3D storyboards in Blender using the Grease Pencil,
many of these changes should also prove useful in other workflows too.
The main highlights here are:
1) It is now possible to edit Grease Pencil strokes
- Use D Tab, or toggle the "Enable Editing" toggles in the Toolbar/Properties regions
to enter "Stroke Edit Mode". In this mode, many common editing tools will
operate on Grease Pencil stroke points instead.
- Tools implemented include Select, Select All/Border/Circle/Linked/More/Less,
Grab, Rotate, Scale, Bend, Shear, To Sphere, Mirror, Duplicate, Delete.
- Proportional Editing works when using the transform tools
2) Grease Pencil stroke settings can now be animated
NOTE: Currently drivers don't work, but if time allows, this may still be
added before the release.
3) Strokes can be drawn with "filled" interiors, using a separate set of
colour/opacity settings to the ones used for the lines themselves.
This makes use of OpenGL filled polys, which has the limitation of only
being able to fill convex shapes. Some artifacts may be visible on concave
shapes (e.g. pacman's mouth will be overdrawn)
4) "Volumetric Strokes" - An alternative drawing technique for stroke drawing
has been added which draws strokes as a series of screen-aligned discs.
While this was originally a partial experimental technique at getting better
quality 3D lines, the effects possible using this technique were interesting
enough to warrant making this a dedicated feature. Best results when partial
opacity and large stroke widths are used.
5) Improved Onion Skinning Support
- Different colours can be selected for the before/after ghosts. To do so,
enable the "colour wheel" toggle beside the Onion Skinning toggle, and set
the colours accordingly.
- Different numbers of ghosts can be shown before/after the current frame
6) Grease Pencil datablocks are now attached to the scene by default instead of
the active object.
- For a long time, the object-attachment has proved to be quite problematic
for users to keep track of. Now that this is done at scene level, it is
easier for most users to use.
- An exception for old files (and for any addons which may benefit from object
attachment instead), is that if the active object has a Grease Pencil datablock,
that will be used instead.
- It is not currently possible to choose object-attachment from the UI, but
it is simple to do this from the console instead, by doing:
context.active_object.grease_pencil = bpy.data.grease_pencil["blah"]
7) Various UI Cleanups
- The layers UI has been cleaned up to use a list instead of the nested-panels
design. Apart from saving space, this is also much nicer to look at now.
- The UI code is now all defined in Python. To support this, it has been necessary
to add some new context properties to make it easier to access these settings.
e.g. "gpencil_data" for the datablock
"active_gpencil_layer" and "active_gpencil_frame" for active data,
"editable_gpencil_strokes" for the strokes that can be edited
- The "stroke placement/alignment" settings (previously "Drawing Settings" at the
bottom of the Grease Pencil panel in the Properties Region) is now located in
the toolbar. These were more toolsettings than properties for how GPencil got drawn.
- "Use Sketching Sessions" has been renamed "Continuous Drawing", as per a
suggestion for an earlier discussion on developer.blender.org
- By default, the painting operator will wait for a mouse button to be pressed
before it starts creating the stroke. This is to make it easier to include
this operator in various toolbars/menus/etc. To get it immediately starting
(as when you hold down DKEy to draw), set "wait_for_input" to False.
- GPencil Layers can be rearranged in the "Grease Pencil" mode of the Action Editor
- Toolbar panels have been added to all the other editors which support these.
8) Pie menus for quick-access to tools
A set of experimental pie menus has been included for quick access to many
tools and settings. It is not necessary to use these to get things done,
but they have been designed to help make certain common tasks easier.
- Ctrl-D = The main pie menu. Reveals tools in a context sensitive and
spatially stable manner.
- D Q = "Quick Settings" pie. This allows quick access to the active
layer's settings. Notably, colours, thickness, and turning
onion skinning on/off.
Organize Maximize/Fullscreen mess and add a new fullscreen mode with no UI
* Maximize Editor: (old Ctrl+Up)
* Full Screen Window: (old Alt + F11)
* Full Screen Editor: new operator (Alt + F10)
* Change Show/Hide Header: (Alt + F9)
When the mode is on moving the mouse near the top right corner of the
editor shows an icon to go back to the normal editor mode.
This was originally intended for the multiview branch, but this
functionality also benefits non-stereo workflows, thus it can be
reviewed and committed independently.
Development notes:
* This includes cleanups in the code to sanitize the naming of
fullscreen/maximize across the window/editor code.
* Originally the idea was to make the window fullscreen as well, but
this idea was dropped.
* You can see the clicking area when debug is 1
* Technically the user can be left with an unfaded icon in the corner
(specially when using a tablet). If we think this is too bad we can
increase the action zone to be the whole screen, or something similar.
Reviewers: campbellbarton [1], ton [2], fsiddi [2]
[1] actual code review
[2] design review
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D678
linked via material
Textures linked to modifiers are now shown in the AnimEditor channel hierarchy
under object level now (i.e. on same level as ob-data, shapekeys, and object's
action). This makes it possible to edit such animation data without having to
ensure that these textures are also linked to the object's material so that they
will appear.
As a side-effect of how this is implemented, if playback is slower on scenes
following this commit, disable the "modifier" filter under the filtering
settings in the relevant animation editor header. In particular, it may be
beneficial to disable this when you've got scenes with meshes that have many
modifiers (but none of these have any linked data with settings which can be
animated), as Blender will still try to go through all those modifiers checking
for anything to show.
F-Curves/Animation as well as Drivers
This is useful for tracking down invalid F-Curves which might need to have their
paths fixed, or perhaps to remove F-Curves for controls which no longer exist in
a new rig.
This commit introduces operators to customise the grouping of F-Curves. As
groups are only available in Actions, these grouping operators only work in the
Dopesheet, Action Editor, and Graph Editor (Animation) modes.
To Use:
* Ctrl-G = Group selected F-Curves
* Alt-G = Ungroup selected F-Curves
* or find these tools from the Channels menu
Notes:
* When invoking the grouping operator from the Channels menu, the name popup
won't show up. Instead, the group(s) created will be created with the default
name. To fix, you can either use the F6 operator properties edit OR manually
edit the names (Ctrl-LMB on the relevant channel)
DopeSheet/Action Editor Channel menus were not working properly
They were not allowing users to choose which setting they affected, which
resulted in "protect" (i.e. the same setting as the editability toggle handles)
always being used.
Also, set hidden flags on a few internally used properties here...
This operator used to be called "Jump to Frame". It basically takes the midpoint
(frame number and/or value) of selected keyframes, and positions the current
frame (or2d-cursor in Graph Editor) at this point.
The hotkey for this is now Ctrl-G (i.e. as it's similar to a "Goto Frame"
feature). It is also now in the Key menu instead of in the relatively obscure
View menu, even though it doesn't actually result in any keyframe edits taking
place.
(Also, fixed a typo/grammer issue with one of Remove Bone Group operator)
with errors
This filtering option is useful when rigging and you want to figure out if any
of your drivers are not functioning, and/or which one(s) are not, so that you
can go through fixing them. It saves you from having to check on each one
individually, or going into the console to try to infer which ones are not
working.
This commit restores the group colours support for F-Curves and F-Curve Groups
in the DopeSheet and Graph Editors. Currently the relevant settings for groups
are only exposed via RNA, but a followup commit will add support for
automatically setting these colours. By default, DopeSheet and Graph Editors are
set to display these colours if/when they are available.
This functionality used to be in 2.48, and is a useful mechanism for visually
distinguishing between channels for different controls when animating (if group
colours are used on the rigs too).
from Troy Sobotka (sobotka), with edits
- remove Markers from Ctrl+L menu (was out of place here and was broken from recent changes to marker operators)
- further de-duplicte scripts by having all menus call the same function: marker_menu_generic().
this fixes bug [#29083] too.
- Make gettext stuff draw-time. so switching between languages
can happens without restart now.
- Added option to translate visible interface (menus, buttons, labels)
and tooltips. Now it's possible to have english UI and localized tooltips.
- Clean-up sources, do not use gettext stuff for things which can be
collected with RNA.
- Fix issues with windows 64bit and ru_RU locale on my desktop
(it was codepage issue).
- Added operator "Get Messages" which generates new text block with
with all strings collected from RNA.
- Changed script for updating blender.pot so now it appends
messages collected from rna to automatically gathered messages.
To update .pot you have to re-generate messages.txt using "Get Messages"
operator and then run update_pot script.
- Clean up old translation stuff which wasn't used and most probably
wouldn't be used.
- Return back "International Fonts" option, so if it's disabled, no
gettext lookups happens on draw.
- Merged read_homefile function back. No need in splitting it.
TODO:
- Custom fonts and font size.
Current font isn't nice at least for russian locale, it's
difficult to read it.
- Put references to messages.txt so gettext can merge translation when
name/description of some property changes.
* Code cleanup in the space_*.py files.
* Removed layout.column() statement in _MT_ panels, they are useless.
* Only define variables at the beginning of a function!
== Datablock filters in the headers are now hidden by default ==
This has been done because users were generally not frequently
toggling these, so quick access vs screen-estate cost wasn't really
worth it to have these always showing and taking up space on the
header.
Usage notes:
- To show these again, click on the "Filter more..." toggle.
- The "Filter more..." button DOES NOT affect whether those filters
apply.
Design notes:
- I tried many other button/icon combinations, but those were either
too space-hogging, vague, or had wrong button order.
- I also tried putting a box around these, but there was too much
padding.
- The ordering of the filters has also been modified a bit so that the
group/fcurve-name filters occur earlier in the list, given that
they're used more frequently
== Graph Editor - Use Fancy Drawing ==
Renamed this option to "Use High Quality Drawing" as suggested by
Matt. "Fancy" isn't really descriptive enough.
== Icons for Mode Dropdowns ==
The mode dropdowns in the DopeSheet and Graph Editors now have icons.
- These were important enough (compared to the auto-snap mode) that
some visual decoration was perhaps warranted.
- It makes it easier to see at a glance what mode the view is in
Icon choices:
- In some cases, the icons seem like quite a natural fit IMO (i.e.
outliner<->dopesheet, key<->shapekey editor, grease pencil, fcurve
editor)
- Action Editor uses an "object" icon to indicate that this is object-
level only for now (though I hope to find a way to address this
soon/later). This will be kept like this until then.
- There isn't any icon for drivers, so after trying a few
alternatives, I settled on area-link icon, since it ties together two
entities using some link.
I'm finally yielding to months of feature requesting, and adding
support for filtering F-Curves by name, where the "name" here is the
text which is displayed for each F-Curve in the Animation Editor
channel lists.
To use, just enable the magnifying-glass toggle on the DopeSheet
filtering settings, and enter a snippet of text to find within the
names of channels you wish to filter. This is case insensitive, and
currently doesn't support any wildcard/regrex fanciness.
Some examples:
loc <--- location curves only
x loc <--- x location curves only
x eul <--- x rotation curves only
rot <--- rotation curves only
etc.
ui/ --> startup/bl_ui
op/ --> startup/bl_operators
scripts/startup/ is now the only auto-loading script dir which gives some speedup for blender loading too.
~/.blender/2.56/scripts/startup works for auto-loading scripts too.
