-> Any Group Duplicate now can get local timing and local NLA override. This
enables to control the entire animation system of the Group.
Two methods for this have been implemented.
1) The quick way: just give the duplicator a "Startframe" offset.
2) Advanced: in the NLA Editor you can add ActionStrips to the duplicator
to override NLA/action of any Grouped Object.
For "Group NLA" to work, an ActionStrip needs to know which Object in a
group it controls. On adding a strip, the code checks if an Action was
already used by an Object in the Group, and assigns it automatic to that
Object.
You can also set this in the Nkey "Properties" panel for the strip.
Change in NLA: the SHIFT+A "Add strip" command now always adds strips to
the active Object. (It used to check where mouse was). This allows to add
NLA strips to Objects that didn't have actions/nla yet.
Important note: In Blender, duplicates are fully procedural and generated
on the fly for each redraw. This means that redraw speed equals to stepping
through frames, when using animated Duplicated Groups.
-> Recoded entire duplicator system
The old method was antique and clumsy, using globals and full temporal
copies of Object. The new system is nicer in control, faster, and since it
doesn't use temporal object copies anymore, it works better with Derived
Mesh and DisplayList and rendering.
By centralizing the code for duplicating, more options can be easier added.
Features to note:
- Duplicates now draw selected/unselected based on its Duplicator setting.
- Same goes for the drawtype (wire, solid, selection outline, etc)
- Duplicated Groups can be normally selected too
Bonus goodie: SHIFT+A (Toolbox) now has entry "Add group" too, with a
listing of all groups, allowing to add Group instances immediate.
-> Library System
- SHIFT+F4 data browse now shows the entire path for linked data
- Outliner draws Library Icons to denote linked data
- Outliner operation added: "Make Local" for library data.
- Outliner now also draws Groups in regular view, allowing to unlink too.
-> Fixes
- depsgraph missed signal update for bone-parented Objects
- on reading file, the entire database was tagged to "recalc" fully,
causing unnecessary slowdown on reading.
Might have missed stuff... :)
Further information is available here:
http://wiki.blender.org/bin/view.pl/Blenderdev/UnicodeFont3D
Shortlist of features:
- Unicode character support for Font3D
- UI to select characters from Unicode character list
- UI to select Unicode table areas
- Optimized character loading (Load only those characters which are used
in font object)
Please test extensively if it breaks anything, try also loading/saving
files, packing fonts, etc.
The official text regression file in the regression suite should be a
good start.
Thanks to mikasaari for this very useful addition!
- "Flush" is now split into two seperate Alignment modes "Flush" and
"Justify":
- Justify does exactly the same as a normal word processor's justify
function does, and in addition, it uses *whitespace* instead of
*character spacing* (kerning) to fill lines. Much more readable.
- Flush is pretty much the old Blender "Flush" mode - and as such it
uses character spacing to fill lines. Just as Justify, this only
works with at least one textframe.
- Underlining for text objects. Not a lot to explain. New button "U" in
the editbuttons, and CTRL-U as hotkey toggle underlining for newly
entered characters or for the selection, just like CTRL-B/CTRL-I do for
bold/italic.
Underline height (thickness) and Underline position (vertical) can be
set in the editbuttons.
Implemented as CU_POLY polygon curves.
- The B, U and i buttons (and the corresponding CTRL-B/U/I keystrokes)
have been fixed to only affect *one* attribute at a time. Formerly,
hitting CTRL-B when no other style was active, on a text portion with
italics text, for example, would kill the italics and just apply bold.
Now, these attributes always add or substract only, but do not
replace the style.
- In the past, there were bugs with material indices uninitialized, and
thus crashes in the renderer with illegal material indices.
Even though I assume they have been fixed, I've put in a check that
checks (hah) if the material index of a character is illegal (bigger
than ob->totcol), and then sets it to zero, and spits out a warning
on stderr.
If you see such warnings, please report and link to the .blend.
- Bugfix: All alignment modes only worked if there were at least *two*
lines of text in the text object. Fixed
There's now a regression test file for text objects, please add to the
corresponding repository:
http://blender.instinctive.de/downloads/release/demo/text-regression.blend.gz
Important notes:
- Full compatibility with old text objects not fully restored
(word spacing will be 0.0, need to set it manually to 1.0), will
either need version upgrade to 238 or a hack. Will check.
- lorem.c (about to be committed) contains BF copyright notice, but as
BF did not exist a few hundred years ago, probably best to remove it :)
- If you notice any cross-platform issues (especially beloved windows),
please report
- A few tiny warnings left, I will fix those issues still.
The rest has been said already - so have fun testing. And please do!
=== Reminder:
=== Documentation at http://blender.instinctive.de/docs/textobject.txt ===
(adding)
#ifdef HAVE_CONFIG_H
#include <config.h>
#endif
also the Makefile.in's were from previous patch adding
the system depend stuff to configure.ac
Kent
--
mein@cs.umn.edu
