After just over a week of coding, I've finished doing a major refactor/cleanup of the constraints code. In the process, quite a few old kludges and ugly hacks have been removed. Also, some new features which will greatly benefit riggers have been implemented.
=== What's New ===
* The long-awaited ``ChildOf Constraint'':
This allows you to animate parent influences, and choose which transformation channels the parent affects the child on (i.e. no translation/rotation/scaling). It should be noted that disabling some combinations may not totally work as expected. Also, the 'Set Inverse' and 'Clear Inverse' buttons at the bottom of this constraint's panel set/clear the inverse correction for the parent's effects. Use these to make the owner not stick/be glued to the parent.
* Constraint/Target Evaluation Spaces:
In some constraints, there are now 1-2 combo boxes at the bottom of their panel, which allows you to pick which `co-ordinate space' they are evaluated in. This is much more flexible than the old 'local' options for bones only were.
* Action Constraint - Loc/Rot/Size Inputs
The Action Constraint can finally use the target's location/rotation/scaling transforms as input, to control the owner of the constraint. This should work much more reliably than it used to. The target evaluation should now also be more accurate due to the new space conversion stuff.
* Transform - No longer in Crazy Space (TM)
Transforming objects/bones with constraints applied should no longer occur in Crazy Space. They are now correctly inverse-corrected. This also applies to old-style object tracking.
=== General Code Changes ===
* solve_constraints is now in constraints.c. I've removed the old `blend consecutive constraints of same type' junk, which made the code more complex than it needed to be.
* evaluate_constraint is now only passed the constraint, and two matrices. A few unused variables have been removed from here.
* A tempolary struct, bConstraintOb, is now passed to solve_constraints instead of relying on an ugly, static workobject in some cases. This works much better.
* Made the formatting of constraint code consistent
* There's a version patch for older files so that constraint settings are correctly converted to the new system. This is currently done for MajorVersion <= 244, and SubVersion < 3. I've bumped up the subversion to 3 for this purpose. However, with the imminent 2.45 release, this may need to be adjusted accordingly.
* LocEulSizeToMat4 and LocQuatSizeToMat4 now work in the order Size, Rot, Location. I've also added a few other math functions.
* Mat4BlendMat4 is now in arithb. I've modified it's method slightly, to use other arithb functions, instead of its crazy blending scheme.
* Moved some of the RigidBodyJoint constraint's code out of blenkernel, and into src. It shouldn't be setting its target in its data initialisation function based + accessing scene stuff where it was doing so.
=== Future Work ===
* Geometry to act as targets for constraints. A space has been reserved for this already.
* Tidy up UI buttons of constraints
* Error print for getSettings was lacking a newline
* When adding a PyConstraint using Ctrl-Alt-C, the script is now queried to find out whether it uses a target.
The BPy Access to PyConstraints. I have not implemented the setter for the PyC-ID-Properties access as I'm not too sure how this should be done.
Also fixed a few typos in the py-docs for the Limit Scale constraint.
At last! The ability to code constraints in Python. This opens up many interesting rigging possibilities, as well as making prototyping constraints easier.
* A PyConstraint script must begin with the line
#BPYCONSTRAINT
* It must also define a doConstraint function, which performs the core actions of the constraint.
* PyConstraints use IDProperties to store custom properties for each PyConstraint instance. The scripter can choose which of these ID-Properties to expose to a user to control the behaviour of the constraint. This must be done using the Draw.PupBlock method.
Credits to Joe Eager (joeedh) for coding the original patch on which this is based. I've made heavy revisions to large parts of the patch.
For more detailed information, and some demo scripts, see the following page:
http://aligorith.googlepages.com/pyconstraints2
In order to give import/export script authors the ability to add properties
to inidividual faces, vertices and edges in the same manner as they are able
to do with ID structures three new custom data types have been added to blender
for floats, integers and strings.
Things to note:
-Since property Layers are custom data, they are added to all verts, edges
or faces at once.
-Only one property layer for each unique property name may exist. In other
words, you cannot have a float layer as well as an integer layer
both with the same name.
-No user interface for this exists at the moment.
The following methods and attributes have been added to the Blender.Mesh
Python module and it's object types:
->MVert/Edge/FaceSeq:
addPropertyLayer(name, type)
removePropertyLayer(name)
renamePropertyLayer(original name, new name)
properties(readonly list.)
->MVert/Edge/Face
getProperty(name)
setProperty(name, value)
->Mesh module
PropertyTypes (readonly dictionary)
This broke theeths UV-Exportscript.
updated and added 2 missing decref's, as well as a check not to write a list of faces greater then the size of the NMesh (mesh and NMesh face lengths can differ)
Lattice.c - removed warning
Mesh.c - (own error) when running me.update(key="...") didnt update the right keyframe.
mesh_cleanup.py - Bugfix from a report by plumiferos that started uncovering all the memory leaks.
Removing NAN verts didnt work with mesh keyframes.
