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...
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
Making both keymap and menu values the same, and adding a (debug only) check in
IDP_EqualsProperties_ex() warning when comparing two floats with nearly the same value.
Removed USE_HIDDEN_PREVIEW from source code as it is now deprecated.
The feature was introduced during project mango to quickly hide previews, now that the previews are hidden by default this feature has no need.
Inside the DNA the flag is still visible in comment, this way no one will reuse that value as it could have some side effects
Jeroen & Monique
- At Mind -
Notes:
* Did not touch to addons, that's up to the authors. ;)
* Did not removed any "name" field below lists. We might want to do this in some cases (less UI clutter), but probably not always, so will let maintainers of the related areas decide here.
Circle select was missing from node editor, and C key was assigned to now defunct "show cyclic dependencies". This patch remaps the key and adds circle select operator.
Functions to check intersection between rctf/rcti and a circle were also added to rct.c for code cleanliness and consistency.
called the generic node tree update function, which is happening anyway after all relevant node operators (if it doesn't that has to be considered a bug).
It has been suggested to better use the C key for circle select, this remains to be discussed.
confusion, grid snap is now the default as it seems to be the most wanted and easy to use mode.
Absolute grid snapping happens in a somewhat generic function 'applyGridAbsolute', which could also be used for objects and other transforms later on. It is conceptually similar to the 'project' snapping
option, in that it calculates a delta vector for each element on top of the overall transform, which places each node on the grid.
Node transform now uses the top-left node corner for TransformData->loc. The transform center is still the average of node centers, so that scaling and rotation works nicely.
snapGrid*** functions have been renamed to snapGridIncrement*** to distinguish better between incremental and absolute grid snapping.
A new operator to alter the backdrop zoom level so that it fits fully within the node editor area, and centers the image.
Shortcut alt-home, as home is used for fitting stuff into the view everywhere.
The material button displayed in the node editor header is the "active_material" of the active object. When pinning the node tree this should ideally be the pinned node tree's material slot, but this
would require adding even more confusing info in SpaceNode to find the correct slot in addition to the id_from datablock. Solution for now is to just disable these buttons when pinning to communicate
better.
New operator "Find Node".
Opens search menu, and allows to find a node based on name or label.
On selecting name, menu selects/activates the node and moves the view to it.
Shortcut: ALT+F
Menu: Node editor, "Select"
To complete previous commit:
New "Activate same type next/prev" operator - replaces the two not working previous ones.
This selects/activates and views the next or previous node of same type.
Shortcuts: Shift ] and Shift [
PyNodes opens up the node system in Blender to scripters and adds a number of UI-level improvements.
=== Dynamic node type registration ===
Node types can now be added at runtime, using the RNA registration mechanism from python. This enables addons such as render engines to create a complete user interface with nodes.
Examples of how such nodes can be defined can be found in my personal wiki docs atm [1] and as a script template in release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py [2].
=== Node group improvements ===
Each node editor now has a tree history of edited node groups, which allows opening and editing nested node groups. The node editor also supports pinning now, so that different spaces can be used to edit different node groups simultaneously. For more ramblings and rationale see (really old) blog post on code.blender.org [3].
The interface of node groups has been overhauled. Sockets of a node group are no longer displayed in columns on either side, but instead special input/output nodes are used to mirror group sockets inside a node tree. This solves the problem of long node lines in groups and allows more adaptable node layout. Internal sockets can be exposed from a group by either connecting to the extension sockets in input/output nodes (shown as empty circle) or by adding sockets from the node property bar in the "Interface" panel. Further details such as the socket name can also be changed there.
[1] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Python_Nodes
[2] http://projects.blender.org/scm/viewvc.php/trunk/blender/release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py?view=markup&root=bf-blender
[3] http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/01/improving-node-group-interface-editing/
This adds border option to compositor, which affects on
a backdrop and viewer nodes, which is useful for faster
previews and tweaks.
Final compositing still happens for the whole frame, but
if it'll be needed it's not so difficult to support it
as well.
To use border there's Ctrl-B shortcut in the compositor
editor, which i used to define region you want to restrict
compositing to. There's also "Viewer Border" option in
the N-panel in case you'll want to disable border
compositing.
Some areas could be cleaned a bit, like ideally it shall
not be viewer image clearing in viewer_border_update RNA
callback, but currently it's not so much clear how to
make it the same fast as simple memset and glue it
somehow to compositor. Will think of nicer solution a
bit later.
Justa cluster did not have enough memory to handle all Mango 4k scenes.
Option is default disabled and can be enabled in the performance panel.
- At Mind -
* Add 3 more operators to the Node menu.
node.join [join selected nodes in a new frame]
node.detach [remove selected nodes from their frame]
node.links_detach [remove all links to selected nodes and try to reconnect neighboring nodes together]
Patch by Philipp Oeser, thanks!
Currently does not support copying of animation data. This would require copying of individual fcurves etc. between data block, which is not implemented yet.
Also it is currently possible to circumvent some constraints of the nodes, in particular for node groups (e.g. no groups inside groups, render layer not inside groups).
* Code cleanup, removed unneeded code.
* Style cleanup, don't break lines to early
(unless marked as pep8-80 or pep8-120 compliant)
* Keep 1 line after layout declaration empty.
1. first pass only fast nodes are calculated and only to the active
viewer node
2. second pass all nodes to all outputs
Temp disabled highlights because of random crashes.
