Previously the pose library used the WholeCharacter key set, which ignores
selection and add keys for almost all bones in the rig. This is a very
slow operation on complex rigs. With this patch, only selected bones are
keyed, defaulting to keying all bones when none are selected.
Note that this fixes the FIXME previously mentioned in the source.
This was a feature request from a few years back (IIRC from ZanQdo?) to make it
easier to reuse one set of driver variables across several different drivers.
Dev Notes:
* Finally it's done! All that trouble for two little buttons.
* Grr... cmake... grrr!
* This includes the "manually create" modes, which correspond to the previous behaviour
for setting up drivers. This is necessary when the current screen layout is not
well suited to having multiple property editors open (e.g. small screen or heavily
subdivided screen).
* Only the modes relevant for the current property type (i.e. array vs single)
will be shown
* The "Add Driver" entries in the RMB context menu have now been replaced by a
submenu which will list all the available mapping types.
* NOTE: The code for the ANIM_OT_button_driver_add() operator is perhaps a bit hairy.
However, it currently allows us to have the desired behaviour. It can always get
cleaned up later though.
Although it isn't currently exposed, this allows for the old behaviour,
where an "empty" driver was added (without any target assigned yet).
For this reason, it's also referred to as the "Manual" mode.
There are also some attempts at improving the tooltips + names for the
other modes (again, not shown anywhere yet)
This commit brings some long requested improvements to the workflow for setting up
drivers, which should make it easier and faster to set up new drivers in a more
interactive fashion.
The new workflow is as follows:
1) Hover over the property (e.g. "Lamp Energy" or "Y Location") or properties ("Rotation")
you wish to add drivers to. We'll refer to this as the "destination"
2) Ctrl-D to active the new "Add Drivers" eyedropper
3) Click on the property you want to use as the source/target. The property under the
mouse will be used to drive the property you invoked Ctrl-D on.
For example, to drive the X, Y, and Z location of the Cube using the Y Location of the Lamp,
hover over any of the X/Y/Z location buttons, hit Ctrl-D, then click on the Y-Location
button of the Lamp object. Drivers will be added to the X, Y, and Z Location properties
of the Cube; each driver will have a single variable, which uses the Y-Location Transform
Channel of the Lamp.
Tips:
- Transform properties will automatically create "Transform Channel" driver variables.
Everything else will use "Single Property" ones
- Due to the way that Blender's UI Context works, you'll need two Properties Panel instances
open (and to have pinned one of the two to show the properties for the unselected
object). It's slightly clunky, but necessary for implementing a workflow like this,
as the UI cannot be manipulated while using eyedroppers to pick data.
- The eyedropper operator implemented here actually has three modes of operation.
1) The "1-N" (one to many) mode is the default used for Ctrl-D, and "Add Driver to All"
in the RMB Menu. This is the behaviour described above.
2) There's also a "1-1" (one to one) mode that is used for the "Add Single Driver" in the
RMB Menu.
3) Finally, there's the "N-N" mode (many to many), which isn't currently exposed.
The point of this is to allow mapping XYZ to XYZ elementwise (i.e. direct copying)
which is useful for things like locations, rotations, scaling, and colours.
Implementation Notes:
- The bulk of the driver adding logic is in editors/animation/drivers.c, where most of
the Driver UI operators and tools are defined
- The property eyedropper code is in interface_eyedropper.c along with all the other
eyedroppers (even though they don't share much actual code in common). However, this
turns out to be necessary, as we can't get access to many of the low-level buttons API's
otherwise.
Todo:
- It may be necessary to restore a way to access the old behaviour (i.e. "manual setup")
in case it is not practical to immediately pick a property.
- Other things to investigate here include extra hotkeys (e.g. Ctrl-Shift-D for Add Single?),
and to expose the N-N mode.
- Other things we could try include interactively applying scaling factors, picking
multiple targets (e.g. for location difference and rotation difference drivers),
and/or other ways of using these property picking methods.
To make it easier for animators working in a multipass pose-to-pose workflow
when inserting breakdown keyframes and so forth, it is now possible to specify
the "type" of keyframe being created (i.e. the colour of the keyframe, when drawn
in the Dope Sheet).
Usage:
1) Choose the type of keyframe ("Keyframe", "Breakdown", "Extreme", etc.) from
the new dropdown located between the AutoKeying and KeyingSet widgets on the
timeline header.
2) Insert keyframes
3) Rejoyce that your newly created keyframes have now been coloured for you already
in the DopeSheet.
Todo:
* Look into a way of using the actual keyframe colours (from the theme) for the icons
of these types.
* 'Show Debug' now enabled for all newly created drivers. For most users, it is
useful to be able to see this to help figure out what's going on
* Removed failed experiment of creating new drivers with Generator FModifiers. I
had hoped that this would make it easier to create drivers that doubled or
halved the input values, but that has proved to not be the case, and instead
made harder for most users to set things up (as they'd have to remove these
first).
Now, when adding drivers from the UI, these get created with two keyframes (at
(0,0) and (1,1) for a 1-1 mapping), which can be easily tweaked normally.
However, for backwards compatability of scripts (notably rigify, and perhaps
some others out there), when creating drivers from scripts, they will still get
created with Generator FModifiers for now. We can review this situation again
for 2.7, but for now it seems ok.
Colors used by Bone Groups are now copied/assigned to Action Groups too when
they're created now. This completes the work started in r.46960 to restore this
functionality from 2.48.
Currently, there is no control over when/whether these colors are copied over
(although it is possible to disable the display of these colors for relevant
animation editors if desired). Originally I was going to make this a more
generic Keying Sets feature, though that turned out to be a bit too complex to
manage.
Other notes:
* Split out the code for copying colors to a common library function
*Add a new idname to keyingsets, keeping name as label-only (using same string for both made lookup fail when using i18n other than english, as it tried to compare an untranslated static string id against a translated RNA name). Also adding a description string (can be helpful with custom keyingsets, imho).
*Fixed a few other bugs related to that area (namely, you can’t deselect current keyingset from the shift-ctrl-alt-I popup menu, and insert/delete key ops were using a rather strange way to get chosen custom keyingset…).
*Fixed UI code so that it always uses (RNA) enum, and simplified menu-creation code.
* Split off code to refresh relative/builtin KeyingSets for the
current context before they get used to a separate function.
* Hooked this up to a new PyAPI/RNA function: KeyingSet.refresh().
Call this before checking the paths that a Keying Set has, especially
if it is not "absolute"
* Added option for "Select Grouped" operator (for Objects), which will
select all objects affected by the active Keying Set. This is probably
more useful for absolute KeyingSets, where changing the selection is
less likely to affect the result.
- The equivalent for bones is currently still in development, but is
likely to be more useful for animators, where rigs are the primary
animation entities they deal with
Causing a flurry of refresh file prompts post-commit,
Confusing local diffs and causing merge conflicts,
Stating the obvious; redundant and useless...
We shall not miss thou, blasted expand $keywords$
It is now possible to create "scripted expression" drivers by simply
clicking on some property, and typing some short Python expression
prefixed with a '#'. This will result in a scripted expression driver,
with the typed-in text being created.
For example, you can click on X-Location of the default cube, and
type:
#sin(frame)
and a new driver will be created for the x-location of the cube. This
will use the current frame value, and modulate this with a sine wave.
Do note though, that the current frame is a special case here. In the
current implementation, a special "frame" driver variable, which
references the current scene frame is created automatically, so that
this simple and (assumed) common case will work straight out of the
box.
Future improvements:
- Explore possibilities of semi-automated extraction of variables from
such expressions, resulting in automated variable extraction. (Doing
away with variables completely is definitely 100% off the agenda
though)
- Look into some ways of defining some shorthands for referencing
local data (possibly related to variable extraction?)
Scene (Toolsettings, i.e. alongside "layered" option for using NLA
while doing auto-keying)
This option makes all Auto-Keying operations use the active Keying Set
to carry out keyframing operations instead of picking and choosing
their own Keying Sets to use, thus cutting down on the number of
unwanted keys.
Warning: if the older userpref option was enabled in an old
startup.blend, it may be difficult to turn this option off.
Keyframing operators now use a dynamically-generated enum for their
"type" property, which determines the Keying Set to use for keyframing
instead of the obscure "index" values which were determined
internally. Internally though, these same indices are still being used
:)
Notes:
- I've kept the menu-building function and the special "menu" operator
for now, since it's better to not "pollute" the actual insert
keyframes operator with hardcoded menu-showing logic. Instead, the
menu operator does that, so that if you like, you could write another
such wrapper that works differently.
- The 'type' properties could have the PROP_HIDDEN flags removed,
though I think it's cleaner to leave these without this option for
now.
- Adding drivers from the UI (not from py-scripts though) will now
automatically add a "Transform Channel" driver variable to the newly
created drivers. This makes setting up drivers a bit more convenient
for the most commonly used case.
- Drivers now report their errors using the Reports system instead of
writing these directly to the console.
- Clarified some comments to be more insightful about the "why's" of
some design decisions, and related formatting/cleanup tweaks
- Reduced scope of "path" vars to just the scope they're required in
- Removed some unused defines from a failed experiment in the original
Keying Sets code ("templates" and "template flags") which was
superseeded by the more flexible + nicer "Builtin KeyingSets"
* Keyframing operators now use the reports system for displaying all its error messages.
- The benefit of this is that users no longer need to check the console for error messages if keyframing fails.
- Unfortunately, reports are not currently viewable in any space/view in Blender, so...
* Added a temporary operator (UI_OT_reports_to_textblock), which can be accessed in the UI from the button which appears in place of the icon when more than one report exists. This dumps the current list of reports to a textblock "Recent Reports", from which they can be viewed.
This isn't really nice, but at least we now have a way to view these again, which makes debugging some things a pain.
* Bugfix #24606 - when trying to add keyframes to F-Curves with F-Modifiers already which alter the curve significantly enough that the keyframes will have no effect, there are now warnings which aim to alleviate any confusion.
Also use const char in many other parts of blenders code.
Currently this gives warnings for setting operator id, label and description since these are an exception and allocated beforehand.
- removed deprecated bitmap arg from IMB_allocImBuf (plugins will need updating).
- mostly tagged UNUSED() since some of these functions look like they may need to have the arguments used later.
* Fractional frames support has been changed to use a new var, scene->r.subframe.
This is a 0.0-1.0 float representing a subframe interval, used in generating a final float
frame number to evaluate animation system etc.
* Changed frame_to_float() and some instances of bsystem_time() into a convenience function:
float BKE_curframe(scene) which retrieves the floating point current frame, after subframe
and frame length corrections.
* Removed blur_offs and field_offs globals. These are now stored in render, used to
generate a scene->r.subframe before render database processing.
* Added operator (Ctrl Shift Alt I) to show menu for changing the active Keying Set in the 3D view (todo item from last commit)
* KeyingSetInfo (i.e. the Builtin Keying Set classes) can now be accessed from Keying Set instances with ks.type_info
* Added ks.remove_all_paths() function to remove all the paths for a Keying Set.
---
These two changes mean that builtin Keying Sets could be refreshed in response to context changes by doing:
<code>
ks = bpy.context.scene.active_keying_set
if ks.absolute==False and ks.type_info:
ksi = ks.type_info
# remove existing paths to fill with new
ks.remove_all_paths()
# check if Keying Set can be used in current context
if ksi.poll(bpy.context):
# call iterator() which calls generate() and re-populates paths list
ksi.iterator(bpy.context, ks)
</code>
And then, once this has been done, the paths that the Keying Set will operate on can be accessed as
<code>
paths = bpy.context.scene.active_keying_set.paths
</code>
* Added 'id_name' property, which is used as the "typeinfo_name" by Keying Set instances. This is simply the name of the relevant KeyingSetInfo classes.
* Renamed the 'array_index' arg for ks.add_path() to 'index'. Also removed the 'entire array' toggle arg in favour of just passing -1 to index. However, Keying Sets in general still maintain their 'entire array' toggle flags for now, it's just that the API function does conversion between the two.
This commit clarifies the somewhat "murky" separation between "builtin" and "absolute" KeyingSets as a result of discussions with Cessen.
* "Builtin" Keying Sets are now just the Keying Sets which in the past have been known as PyKeyingSets or Relative KeyingSets. These are registered from Py Scripts at startup, and will use the context info to determine what data they should be keyframing. These are stored per Blender session, independent of files, since usually these will be coded specific to sets of rigs used at a studio.
* "Absolute" Keying Sets are the ones that you can create from the Scene buttons and/or KKEY or RMB over any property. They specify the exact set of properties which should always get keyframed together. These are stored in the scene.
In relation to this, I've made it possible to now set one of the builtin Keying Set types as the active Keying Set.
* For now, this can only be done via the box beside the insert/delete key operator buttons on the TimeLine header (now complete with an recycled icon - HINT TO ICON DESIGNERS, to make this a bit more obvious). Later on I'll commit an operator to set this via a hotkey.
* The "IKEY" menu will only show up when there is no active Keying Set. When there is one, keying will happen silently (with info notice at the top of the screen). Later on, I'll hook this menu up to a hotkey, so that that active Keying Set can be changed without inserting keyframes or clearing active Keying Set...
* By default, there isn't any default Keying Set enabled. IMO, this is probably a good default, though some might like to have LocRotScale instead.
* I'm not terribly impressed with the search menu for the items being SORTED (and of all things, alphabetically!) currently, since this does break muscle-memory with the menu (and jumbles up order of closely related vs not closely related).
* The Scene buttons for KeyingSets still need some changes to fully cope with users setting builtin KeyingSets as active sometimes. Controls which are useless or shouldn't be used when a builtin set is shown are being shown.
Builtin set registrations have been tweaked a bit:
* Renamed "bl_idname" to "bl_label" for consistency with rest of API. Note that this is the identifier used by Blender internally when searching for the KeyingSet, and is also what the user sees.
After a few days of wrong turns and learning the finer points of RNA-type-subclassing the hard way, this commit finally presents a refactored version of the Keying Sets system (now version 2) based on some requirements from Cessen.
For a more thorough discussion of this commit, see
http://sites.google.com/site/aligorith/keyingsets_2.pdf?attredirects=0&d=1
------
The main highlight of this refactor is that relative Keying Sets have now been recoded so that Python callbacks are run to generate the Keying Set's list of paths everytime the Keying Set is used (to insert or delete keyframes), allowing complex heuristics to be used to determine whether a property gets keyframed based on the current context. These checks may include checking on selection status of related entities, or transform locks.
Built-In KeyingSets have also been recoded, and moved from C and out into Python. These are now coded as Relative Keying Sets, and can to some extent serve as basis for adding new relative Keying Sets. However, these have mostly been coded in a slightly 'modular' way which may be confusing for those not so familiar with Python in general. A usable template will be added soon for more general usage.
Keyframing settings (i.e. 'visual', 'needed') can now be specified on a per-path basis now, which is especially useful for Absolute Keying Sets, where control over this is often beneficial.
Most of the places where Auto-Keyframing is performed have been tidied up for consistency. I'm sure quite a few issues still exist there, but these I'll clean up over the next few days.
* Added a User-Pref option for the "XYZ to RGB" colour-mode setting for new F-Curves to compliment the one used for Keying Sets. With this option enabled, the builtin Keying Sets also can obey this option.
* Made all places that were previously manually checking the flags for keyframing to use a standard API function to do this now.
* Fixed bug introduced earlier today in commit 25353 by reverting the changes to keyingsets.c. Forgot that delete_keyframe doesn't handle do the "entire array" hack with array_index = -1
* Fixed bug with the insert-keyframe code for the array_index = -1 case, where too many channels were being keyed (i.e. an imaginary channel was often keyed in addition to the valid ones)
