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.
In the other Dopesheet modes, the "Speaker" icon was used to refer to
"animation playback muting", while for GP layers, this was being incorrectly
abused for "layer visibility in viewport".
This commit fixes that by making the following changes:
* A new "eye" icon toggle is added for controlling GP Layer visibility
* The "speaker" icon toggle now controls "Lock Frame to Current" functionality,
which functions more like the "animation playback muting" that is generally
expected.
Each LINES draw call is now responsible for its own line width. No need
to set it back to its 1.0 default after every draw.
This eliminates half our calls to glLineWidth , similar to last week’s
work on glPointSize.
- Add blentranslation `BLT_*` module.
- moved & split `BLF_translation.h` into (`BLT_translation.h`, `BLT_lang.h`).
- moved `BLF_*_unifont` functions from `blf_translation.c` to new source file `blf_font_i18n.c`.
Sliders in for FCurves in the animation editors were leaving space for
one extra setting that they didn't need to be accounting for (and which
wasn't shown, as it isn't valid for FCurves).
It now takes (almost) the whole available width of the region. Icons on the right hand side are hidden during text input now, they can't be used then anyway. Using this space for the text input button makes more sense.
When renaming animation channels, the old names are no longer drawn behind the
text boxes anymore. This used to cause problems if the names were long, or
if text boxes were set to have transparent backgrounds.
Thanks to kopias for reporting on IRC.
Using the standard "FCurve" animchannel type didn't work that well for
the control FCurves on NLA Strips, as the paths would not resolve correctly,
and the indentation was wrong. Also, there would likely be issues down the
track with applying NLA mapping. Hence, it's easier to just create a separate
type for this case, and adapt the rest of the code to also consider these (todo).
The "Nla Strip Controls" channel is used to house the per-strip
FCurves for controlling the strip_time and influence properties.
It sits above the active action's first group, at the same level
in the hierarchy as other groups.
TODO: It looks like a dedicated FCurve channel is needed for these
control FCurves, so that we won't accidentally apply NLA mapping
or have these FCurves disabled by the path lookups failing.
Both were maked as temp, but used often.
Now pass uiFontStyle to both, rename UI_draw_string to UI_fontstyle_draw_simple,
since its a variant of UI_fontstyle_draw that skips shadow, align... etc.
The layers list and the Dopesheet channels now show color swatches for both the
stroke and fill colours now. This is useful when you've got layers that only
use either/or.
* Currently, these only get shown if the relevant opacity setting is high enough
for that aspect to contribute to the result.
* The sizing of these items could do with some more tweaking (especially in the
Dopesheet), as these may now be too small to accurately see and/or interact with.
* There are some potential issues when using near-gray (or actually, colours similar
to the list backgrounds, but that issue exists in other areas of Blender anyway.
(NOTE: At this stage, these changes are still experimental, and not for 2.73 yet)
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.
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 makes it easier for finding the active or first selected channel
(where actual data channels need to be favoured over expanders - which come
first), as previously, long switch statements were needed everytime.
This now works (barring one or two minor glitches and the operator on the pushdown
button being a bit of a hack). The old drawing code is still in place though, and
will be kept around for a little while yet while the last kinks are ironed out.
This commit lays some of the groundwork needed to port the last of the NLA Editor
channel types that's still defined using custom code. By moving this code over
to the newer standardised framework, this will enable widgets to have tooltips
to make it easier for users to find out what various buttons do.
Currently this isn't hooked up to anything though.
Changes:
- acf.name_prop() and acf.has_setting() now return bools instead of shorts
- Renamed a few name_prop() callbacks whose names ended in "_nameprop"
instead of "_name_prop", which made it difficult to safely find all
such instances
NLA Track drawing has now been ported over to use the UI widgets
like the rest of the anim channels do in the DopeSheet and Graph
Editors. The main benefit of this for users is that these buttons
will now show tooltips when you hover over them. Hopefully this
will help make the "solo" buttons more discoverable.
I've decided to postpone porting the "Action Line" channels to the
widget system for now, since there are quite a few more issues there
which need quite a bit more time to work through.
