There has been quite a bit of fuss about particle dupliobject rotation in 2.59, so here are some changes to make things work a bit more consistently and predictably in 2.60.
Much of the confusion has been about what the "Initial rotation" for particles actually means. Simply put it's just a vector that that the particles (and the dupliobjects) are aligned to and around which they can be rotated with the phase controls. I've now renamed these controls under a label "Rotation axis".
In 2.59 and previous versions the dupliobject's global x-axis was aligned to the particle rotation axis for non-hair particles. This meant that the object's own rotation (in addition to the particle rotation) could effect the dupliobjects' rotations. This old behavior can still be used with the "Rotation" option in the particle render panel when object/group is set as the visualization. This option is also activated automatically for old files to maintain backwards compatibility.
Now the default dupliobject rotations ignore the object's own rotation completely and align the object's tracking axis to the particle rotation axis. The tracking axis can be found under the Object tab -> Animation Hacks panel.
In 2.58 the way of calculating the rotation for hair didn't work as intended and enabled many non-functional combinations of options. For this reason I removed most of the rotation options for hair in 2.59. Now the options have been reimplemented better and the dupliobject's tracking axis is aligned to the hair direction by default (Rotation axis = Velocity / Hair). All the other axis options work too along with the phase controls.
- particle.c wasn't setting all components of the vector when reading cache and setting dummy velocity values.
- some functions incorrectly took a float[3] argument when the 4th value was set.
- remove a few redundant lines of code.
Reported by Jean Francois Sarazin
Lack of normal normalisation caused scaling issues. SIGGRAPH fix by jahka and jesterKing. Thanks to host dfelinto with entertainment provided by slikdigit.
* Objects are now always rotated in the directions of the hair paths
* Secondary fix: particle size wasn't updated for hair particles, so dupliobject size couldn't be change after the hair was edited
* Noise is now considered an animated texture as it changes with every frame
* Converted a few places in particles code to use the particle system's own random table instead of BLI_frand.
* Canvas and brush can be now enabled simultaneously. This way it's possible for two canvases to interact.
* Added basic anti-aliasing support for vertex surfaces.
* 3D-view color preview now works even when there's subsurf modifier after Dynamic Paint in modifier stack.
* Added a new brush option to use proximity from object center.
* Default surface frame range now use scene's start and end values.
* Improved ray checks for volume brushes.
* Added new "non-closed" option for volume brushes. This way it's possible to use planar meshes as "volume" brushes with predefined ray direction.
* New carrot branch splash image by CGEffex.
* Improved brush affection code.
* Lots of smaller improvements.
* Fixed: Weight paint didn't work with particles.
* Fixed: Point cache didn't work for non-wave surfaces anymore since last commit.
In addition the billboards can be scaled by the particle velocity with optional head and tail factors (similar to line drawing options). This allows for pseudo-motionblur effects.
Committed changes from previous weeks, biggest changes are:
* Canvas can now have multiple "surfaces" that each can have specific format, type and settings.
* Renewed UI to support this new system.
* Aside from old "image sequence" output format, Dynamic Paint can now work on vertex level as well. Currently vertex paint and displace are supported.
* Integrated vertex level painting with Point Cache.
* Added viewport preview for Point Cache surfaces.
Due to massive amount of changes, old Dynamic Paint saves are no longer supported. Also some features are temporarily missing or may not work properly.
- making local object data - Curve/Mesh/MBall lost references to linked materials.
- joining a linked mesh object into a local one lost the link.
As well as these reported bugs, checked all local functions for consistency/correctness and found other cases which would also fail.
- making local metaball didn't ensure unique ID name.
- make_local_armature() was missing check for object users - main body of code would never run.
- local particles didn't set the dupli-group or textures to extern.
checked all local functions for consistency/correctness.
