All in all, this patch adds an Alembic importer, an Alembic exporter,
and a new CacheFile data block which, for now, wraps around an Alembic
archive. This data block is made available through a new modifier ("Mesh
Sequence Cache") as well as a new constraint ("Transform Cache") to
somewhat properly support respectively geometric and transformation data
streaming from alembic caches.
A more in-depth documentation is to be found on the wiki, as well as a
guide to compile alembic: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/
User:Kevindietrich/AlembicBasicIo.
Many thanks to everyone involved in this little project, and huge shout
out to "cgstrive" for the thorough testings with Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini
and Realflow as well as @fjuhec, @jensverwiebe and @jasperge for the
custom builds and compile fixes.
Reviewers: sergey, campbellbarton, mont29
Reviewed By: sergey, campbellbarton, mont29
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2060
Currently "long keyframes" are only useful for indicating where stationary
holds occur. If however you try to create a "moving hold" (where the values
are slightly different, but in terms of overall effect, it's still a hold)
then it could get tricky to keep track of where these occur.
Now it's possible to tag such keyframes (using the keyframe types - RKEY)
as being part of a moving hold. These will not only be drawn differently
from normal keyframes, but they will also result in a "long keyframe"
being drawn between each pair of them, just like if they had been completely
stationary instead.
Currently the theming/styling of these is a bit rough. They reuse the existing
theme colours for long keyframes.
This commit introduces a scale factor setting for scaling all keyframe indicators
in the Dopesheet Editor up/down, in order to make them easier to select. It is perhaps
most useful for keyframe types which are usually indicated using smaller keyframes
(e.g. breakdown), which may get tricky to quickly select.
Idea is to replace hard-to-track (id->lib != NULL) 'is linked datablock' check everywhere in Blender
by a macro doing the same thing. This will allow to easily spot those checks in future, and more importantly,
to easily change it (see work done in asset-engine branch).
Note: did not touch to readfile.c, since there most of the time 'id->lib' check actually concerns the pointer,
and not a check whether ID is linked or not. Will have a closer look at it later.
Reviewers: campbellbarton, brecht, sergey
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2082
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.
For a long time, one of the bottlenecks when drawing summary channels in the dopesheet
(especially with many objects) was how the long keyframes feature (i.e showing holds
between keyframes) got built. Specifically, it was the step where we check on the previous
keyframe to see whether there's a hold between those two.
The old code performed some elaborate checks, which made sense back when we used to handle
certain summary channels (e.g. object-action/ipo, and groups IIRC) differently. However,
nowadays, everything just does it by going over the FCurves one by one, so the offending
code wasn't really providing much benefit. Unless I've forgotten some other reason why
that old method is necessary, this commit should provide a decent speedup here, making
things somewhat interactive now (if still a bit jerky).
Other Tweaks:
1) Introduced float-precision threshold when checking to see whether an existing long
keyframe could be reused. This should hopefully reduce the number of fp-jitter issues
when creating summaries for many channels, reducing the number of duplicates created.
2) Precompute colours used for shading the long keyframes, instead of recomputing for
each block.
* Version patching fixes for theme settings
* Added missing support for NLA (needed for the keyframes drawn in the action lines)
* Fix for a lack of contrast between selected and unselected extreme keyframe type
(restoring it back to the pre-patch color scheme)
* Fix for keyframes on protected channels not being drawn with partial opacity
This patch makes it possible to customise the colours used for the different
keyframe types (Keyframe, Breakdown, Extreme, Jitter) and the border colours
(normal and selected).
Reviewed by: Joshua Leung
Nice formatted version (pictures soon):
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.66/Usability
Short list of main changes:
- Transparent region option (over main region), added code to blend in/out such panels.
- Min size window now 640 x 480
- Fixed DPI for ui - lots of cleanup and changes everywhere. Icon image need correct size still, layer-in-use icon needs remake.
- Macbook retina support, use command line --no-native-pixels to disable it
- Timeline Marker label was drawing wrong
- Trackpad and magic mouse: supports zoom (hold ctrl)
- Fix for splash position: removed ghost function and made window size update after creation immediate
- Fast undo buffer save now adds UI as well. Could be checked for regular file save even...
Quit.blend and temp file saving use this now.
- Dixed filename in window on reading quit.blend or temp saves, and they now add a warning in window title: "(Recovered)"
- New Userpref option "Keep Session" - this always saves quit.blend, and loads on start.
This allows keeping UI and data without actual saves, until you actually save.
When you load startup.blend and quit, it recognises the quit.blend as a startup (no file name in header)
- Added 3D view copy/paste buffers (selected objects). Shortcuts ctrl-c, ctrl-v (OSX, cmd-c, cmd-v).
Coded partial file saving for it. Could be used for other purposes. Todo: use OS clipboards.
- User preferences (themes, keymaps, user settings) now can be saved as a separate file.
Old option is called "Save Startup File" the new one "Save User Settings".
To visualise this difference, the 'save startup file' button has been removed from user preferences window. That option is available as CTRL+U and in File menu still.
- OSX: fixed bug that stopped giving mouse events outside window.
This also fixes "Continuous Grab" for OSX. (error since 2009)
--debug
--debug-ffmpeg
--debug-python
--debug-events
--debug-wm
This makes debug output easier to read - event debug prints would flood output too much before.
For convenience:
--debug-all turns all debug flags on (works as --debug did before).
also removed some redundant whitespace in debug prints and prefix some prints with __func__ to give some context.
- spelling - turns out we had tessellation spelt wrong all over.
- use \directive for doxy (not @directive)
- remove BLI_sparsemap.h - was from bmesh merge IIRC but entire file commented and not used.
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 $keywords$
Channels can now be used as "animation containers" to be filtered
further to obtain a set of subsidiary channels (i.e. F-Curves
associated with some summary channel).
The main use of this is that object and scene summary channels can now
be defined without defining the filtering logic in three different
places - once for channel filtering, once for drawing keyframes in
action editor, and once for editing these keyframes.
An indirect consequence of this, is that the "Only selected channels"
option in Timeline will now result in only the keyframes for a
selected bones getting shown (when enabled), instead of all keyframes
for the active object. This was requested by Lee during Durian, and is
something which has only become possible as a result of this commit.
* This (big) commit is aimed at cleaning up the filtering flags used
by the animation channel filtering code. The list of filtering flags
has been growing a bit "organically" since it's humble origins for use
in the Action Editor some 3 years (IIRC) ago now during a weekend
hackathon. Obviously, some things have ended up tacked on, while
others have been the product of other flag options. Nevertheless, it
was time for a bit of a spring clean!
* Most notably, one area where the system outgrown its original design
for the Action Editor was in terms of the "visibility" filtering flag
it was using. While in the Action Editor the concept of what channels
to include was strictly dictated by whether the channel hierarchy
showed it, in the Graph Editor this is not always the case. In other
words, there was a difference between the data the channels
represented being visible and the channels for that data being visible
in the hierarchy.
Long story short: this lead to bug report [#27076] (and many like it),
where if you selected an F-Curve, then collapsed the Group it was in,
then even after selecting another F-Curve in another Group, the
original F-Curve's properties would still be shown in the Properties
Region. The good news is that this commit fixes this issue right away!
* More good news will follow, as I start checking on the flag usage of
other tools, but I'm committing this first so that we have a stable
reference (of code similar to the old buggy stuff) on which we can
fall back to later to find bugs (should they pop up).
Anyways, back to the trenches!
This tool automates the process of copying a pose to successive
keyframes, making it easier for animators to go back and change the
pose for some controls which remain "static" for periods of time.
Previously, animators would need to do a "{Ctrl-Pageup Ctrl-V} *
number_of_static_keyframes" dance for each set of controls that this
happened on, which is not too good ergonomically speaking.
There are two modes exposed via the menu (Pose->Propagate):
- "Pose Propagate" - also known as the 'WHILE_HELD' mode, which
propagates to all keyframes that are holding the same value
- "To Next Keyframe" - which only propagates the pose to the closest
keyframe in the occurring after (but not including) the current frame
Additionally, there are a few other modes that can be used, though
they are less useful for direct use from the UI, though they can be
used via the PyAPI as need be.
---
Also, I did some cleanups in the "Pose" menu to bring it more into
line with the Object mode one. There are some more tweaks that could
still be done here, such as bringing the keyframing operator entries
under a submenu too (as in the Object mode version) to get the length
of this under control.
