* 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* The "Add Driver" entries in the RMB context menu have now been replaced by a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.
When linking a rotation property to a non-rotation property (going in either
direction - i.e. rot -> normal, normal -> rot), the driver expression will
now be set so that the new drivers behave as expected (i.e. you get the values
you see, instead of "weird" values that seem several orders of magnitude off).
This may not be that great for everyone (i.e. the rare users out there who
actually like to look at their rotations in radians), but they usually know
what they're doing anyway, so this will be easy to correct.
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.
This calls are not strictly speaking needed for the old dependency graph, but
due to more granular nature of upcoming depsgraph more actions requires update
of relations of IDs.
On the one hand this extra tags could be wrapped with if() statements, but on
the other hand it makes sense to keep tag in sync so it's clear if some issue
is caused by missing/extra tag or by depsgraph itself.
Make the UI API more consistent and reduce confusion with some naming.
mainly:
- API function calls
- enum values
some internal static functions have been left for now
This is only a (hacky) partial fix, actually, since `RNA_property_animated()` will still
not work in those cases... Better that than nothing, though.
Thanks to Campbell for review.
* '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.
Most of the places which relied on RNA_path_resolve() did so believing that if
it returned true, that it had found a valid property, and that the returned
pointer+property combination would be what the path referred to. However, it
turns out that if the property at the end of the path turns out to be a
"pointer" property (e.g. "data" for Object.data), this would automatically
become the pointer part, while the prop part would be set to null. Hence, if a
user accidentally (or otherwise) specifies a path for the single-property driver
variable type like this, then Blender would crash.
This commit introduces two convenience functions - RNA_path_resolve_property()
and RNA_path_resolve_property_full() - which mirror/wrap the existing
RNA_path_resolve() functions. The only difference though is that these include a
check to ensure that what was found from resolving the path was in fact a
property (they only return true iff this is the case), and make it explicitly
clear in the name that this is what they will do so that there's no further
confusion. It is possible to do without these wrapper functions by doing these
checks inline, but the few cases that had been patched already were pretty
hideous looking specimens. Using these just make it clearer and simpler for all.
I've also beefed up the docs on these a bit, and changed these to using bools.
besides performance in some cases.
* DAG_scene_sort is now removed and replaced by DAG_relations_tag_update in
most cases. This will clear the dependency graph, and only rebuild it right
before it's needed again when the scene is re-evaluated.
This is done because DAG_scene_sort is slow when called many times from
python operators. Further the scene argument is not needed because most
operations can potentially affect more than the current scene.
* DAG_scene_relations_update will now rebuild the dependency graph if it's not
there yet, and DAG_scene_relations_rebuild will force a rebuild for the rare
cases that need it.
* Remove various places where ob->recalc was set manually. This should go
through DAG_id_tag_update() in nearly all cases instead since this is now
a fast operation. Also removed DAG_ids_flush_update that goes along with
such manual tagging of ob->recalc.
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 $keywords$
handle/key
This used to be a weird per-curve setting which would happen to get
applied/work correctly if handles were set to "auto", and was a source
of constant confusion for both old and new animators. The main effect
of this handle-type/option was really to just ensure that auto-handles
stayed horizontal, instead of tilting as the keys were moved.
This commit simply changes this from a per-curve to per
keyframe/handle setting.
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?)
most local modifier,GPU,ImBuf and Interface functions are now static.
also fixed an error were the fluid modifier definition and the header didnt have the same number of args.
- use NULL rather then 0 where possible (makes code & function calls more readable IMHO).
- set static variables and functions (exposed some unused vars/funcs).
- use func(void) rather then func() for definitions.
Drivers created from the Properties Editor for Materials and Textures
will now be created on Object-level instead of on their owner
Material/Texture as for their keyframes.
The intention of this hack is to allow users to be able to easily set
up drivers for materials and textures. Without this hack, users would
have had to do this manually via the Datablocks editor (I've described
this method a few times in detail, though this still attracts
complaints), as the way the depsgraph works does not allow ID blocks
other than Objects and directly-linked Object data to be driven. As a
result, although this hack can be done for these two cases, there are
no workarounds possible for Scene and Scene-linked settings.
There are 2 issues that will be noticed with this approach:
1) There may be confusion over why the drivers are found under Object
level and not Material/Texture level.
2) Driver status will not be shown in the buttons, leading to attempts
to try to keyframe the properties directly later and subsequent
confusion when finding that that won't work.
However, these are the sacrifices we'll need to make to get easy-setup
working in the meantime until the proper fixes can be done.
