The Physics button controls the creation of a physics representation
of the object when starting the game. If the button is not selected,
the object is a pure graphical object with no physics representation
and all the other physics buttons are hidden.
Selecting this button gives access to the usual physics buttons.
The physics button is enabled by default to match previous Blender
behavior.
The margin parameter allows to control the collision margin from
the UI. Previously, this parameter was only accessible through
Python. By default, the collision margin is set to 0.0 on static
objects and 0.06 on dynamic objects.
To maintain compatibility with older games, the collision margin
is set to 0.06 on all objects when loading older blend file.
Note about the collision algorithms in Bullet 2.71
--------------------------------------------------
Bullet 2.71 handles the collision margin differently than Bullet 2.53
(the previous Bullet version in Blender). The collision margin is
now kept "inside" the object for box, sphere and cylinder bound
shapes. This means that two objects bound to any of these shape will
come in close contact when colliding.
The static mesh, convex hull and cone shapes still have their
collision margin "outside" the object, which leaves a space of 1
or 2 times the collision margin between objects.
The situation with Bullet 2.53 was more complicated, generally
leading to more space between objects, except for box-box collisions.
This means that running a old game under Bullet 2.71 may cause
visual problems, especially if the objects are small. You can fix
these problems by changing some visual aspect of the objects:
center, shape, size, position of children, etc.
the features that are needed to run the game. Compile tested with
scons, make, but not cmake, that seems to have an issue not related
to these changes. The changes include:
* GLSL support in the viewport and game engine, enable in the game
menu in textured draw mode.
* Synced and merged part of the duplicated blender and gameengine/
gameplayer drawing code.
* Further refactoring of game engine drawing code, especially mesh
storage changed a lot.
* Optimizations in game engine armatures to avoid recomputations.
* A python function to get the framerate estimate in game.
* An option take object color into account in materials.
* An option to restrict shadow casters to a lamp's layers.
* Increase from 10 to 18 texture slots for materials, lamps, word.
An extra texture slot shows up once the last slot is used.
* Memory limit for undo, not enabled by default yet because it
needs the .B.blend to be changed.
* Multiple undo for image painting.
* An offset for dupligroups, so not all objects in a group have to
be at the origin.
(partial because I'll merge all snap code in one fell swoop after the libs are done)
----------------------------------
object: ray - boundbox intersection test
=======================
Caching and Baking:
- The point cache is now cleared on DAG_object_flush_update(), and not cleared for time dependency graph updates.
- There is now a Bake button instead of Protect. Also cache start and end frames were added to softbody and particles.
- The cloth autoprotect feature was removed.
- The Ctrl+B menu now also bakes cloth and particles next to softbody and fluids. Additionally there are now frree bake and free cache menu entries.
- The point cache api has been changed. There is now a PTCacheID struct for each point cache type that can be filled and then used to call the point cache functions.
- PointCache struct was added to DNA and is automatically allocated for each physics type.
- Soft body now supports Bake Editing just like cloth.
- Tried to make the systems deal consistently with time ipo's and offsets. Still not sure it all works correct, but too complicated to solve completely now.
Library Linking:
- Added some more warnings to prevent editing settings on library linked objects.
- Linked objects now read from the cache located next to the original library file, and never write to it. This restores old behavior for softbodies. For local simulation the mesh and not the object should be linked.
- Dupligroups and proxies can't create local point caches at the moment, how to implement that I'm not sure. We probably need a proxy point cache for that to work (ugh).
Physics UI:
- Renamed deflection panel to collision for consistency and reorganized the buttons. Also removed some softbody collision buttons from the softbody panel that were duplicated in this panel for cloth.
- Tweaked field panel buttons to not jump around when changing options.
- Tabbing e.g. Soft Body Collision into the Soft Body panel, it now only shows Collision to make the panel names readable.
- I tried to make enabled/disabling physics more consistent, since all three system did things different. Now the two modifier buttons to enable the modifier for the viewport and rendering are also duplicated in the physics panels. Toggling the Soft Body and Cloth buttons now both remove their modifiers.
- Fixed modifier error drawing glitch.
Particles:
- Particles are now recalculated more often than before. Previously it did partial updates based on the changes, but that doesn't work well with DAG_object_flush_update() ..
- Fixed memory leak loading keyed particle system. Now keys are not written to file anymore but always created after loading.
- Make particle threads work with autothreads.
Continue Physics:
- The timeline play now has a Continue Physics option in the playback menu, which keeps the simulations going without writing them to the cache.
- This doesn't always work that well, some changes are not immediately updated, but this can be improved later. Still it's fun to get a feel for the physics.
Todo:
- Point cache can get out of sync with and undo and changing a file without saving it.
- Change the point cache file format to store a version (so old point cache files can be either converted or at least ignored), and to do correct endian conversion.
- Menu item and/or buttons for Ctrl+B.
- A system("rm ..") was changed to remove() since the former is very slow for clearing point caches. These system() calls were already giving trouble in a bug in the tracker, but really most use of this system("") should be changed and tested.
- The Soft Body Collision and Clot Collision panel titles don't mention there's point cache settings there too, doing that makes them unreadable with the default panel setup.. but may need to make the names longer anyway.
This time is was due to different accuracy of floating point computation,
now it uses does a comparison a bit different to avoid this.
Also changed the vectoquat function to be threadsafe.
I'm committing some work-in-progress code for "bone groups" now, as I there have been are some major bugs caused by the timeoffset stuff (some of my test files were not loading, and other files were showing all sorts of weird problems).
Anyway, in this commit, the following things for "bone groups" have been done:
* Bone groups are stored per armature (internally, this is per bPose block)
* Added controls for editing bone-groups per armature - "add", "remove", "rename". These can be found in the "Links and Materials" panel in PoseMode, beside the settings for PoseLib.
* Reorganised buttons for editing selected bones in PoseMode. I've replaced the "dist" and "weight" buttons (they existed in EditMode anyway) with a menu to choose the bone-group and the custom-shape-ob field. In the place of the old custom-shape-ob field, I've restored the "Hide" button. This might break muscle-memory a bit, but there isn't a lot of space to play with there.
Some stuff I'd been originally planning to do before committing:
* When adding keyframes for bones, an action-group with the same name as the bone's group will be added to the action, and the action-channel will be made a member of that.
* New action/bone groups have unique names (renaming/adding new should check if name exists before assigning it)
* There's a setting under Bone-Groups stuff which sets which custom-colour set is used to colour that group's bones. Currently, this is non-functional, as the necessary drawing code for armatures is not in place yet.
Based on feedback from Ton, I've recoded the way "PoseLibs" are implemented/exposed. Therefore, quite a bit of code has been changed to fit this in better.
Now, ANY ACTION can be a "PoseLib". A set of Markers which belong to the Action (it's taken a year, but they're finally back), are used to tag "poses" in the Action. These markers are shown using diamond-shaped blue icons (designed by Matt Ebb) in three shades - unselected/normal, selected, active.
Notes:
* Each Armature Object has an Action which acts as a PoseLib.
* Improved UI presented in buttons panel for this
-- added proper buttons for action assigning
-- renamed "Validate PoseLib" to "Auto-Sync PoseLib" (this option auto-tags poses based on keyframes found)
Like in the 3d-view, use the hotkeys:
* Shift-L to add a local marker
* Ctrl-Shift-L to rename a local marker
* Alt-L to delete selected local markers
Note: transforms, etc. are not currently available with these markers
== PoseLib Preview ==
Added a few features here:
* Left/Right-Arrow keys now change the poses too (previous and next respectively)
* Up/Down-Arrow keys also change the poses, but "jump" to a pose 5 steps away in their respective directions
"A slightly late Christmas present for the Animators out there :-)"
This tool allows animators to store frequently used poses in an action, and be able to label those poses to help them retrieve them later. In a way, it acts as a glorified clipboard for poses.
One of the cool features with this is the ability to select which stored pose to use interactively in the 3d-view. Once a few poses have been stored in the PoseLib, simply use the "Ctrl L" hotkey to start previewing. Use the Mousewheel or the Page Up/Down keys to change poses, and confirm/cancel the preview in the same way as you do for transforms.
Usage Notes:
* Each Armature may get its own PoseLib. PoseLibs are simply actions with extra data, so they can get relinked.
* Manually editing actions used as PoseLibs is not a good idea, as some data may not be able to be found. Tools to automagically find poses in an action could be investigated...
* PoseLib will only apply/retrieve poses to/from selected bones
* A basic UI for this can be found in the "Links and Materials" panel. Most of the PoseLib tools are presented there.
Useful Hotkeys (also found in Pose->PoseLib menu):
* Ctrl L - interactively preview poses
* Shift L - add a new pose or replace an existing pose in the PoseLib with the current pose
* Ctrl Shift L - rename an existing pose in the PoseLib
* Alt L - remove a pose from the poselib.c
=========
- The render and realtime button for the particle system modifier
and the enabled button for particles now work seperate again,
made a bad design decision to tie them together. Now with only
the render button and not realtime enabled it renders.
- Fix for bug #7948: particle mode crash while constraining axis.
- Fix for bug #7945: crash loading effector groups from an old file.
- Fix for bug #7942: crash for reactor particles emitting from particles.
used for clipping were being stored in the mesh, but modifiers
can result in two objects with the same mesh having a different
bounding box. Solution is to store bounding box in the object.
- Library referencing didn't add the new local Ipo for constraints
- Proxy command didn't set the driver object in constraint ipo to be
the new proxy object.
=========
Merge of the famous particle patch by Janne Karhu, a full rewrite
of the Blender particle system. This includes:
- Emitter, Hair and Reactor particle types.
- Newtonian, Keyed and Boids physics.
- Various particle visualisation and rendering types.
- Vertex group and texture control for various properties.
- Interpolated child particles from parents.
- Hair editing with combing, growing, cutting, .. .
- Explode modifier.
- Harmonic, Magnetic fields, and multiple falloff types.
.. and lots of other things, some more info is here:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Particles_Rewritehttp://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/Particles_Rewrite_Doc
The new particle system cannot be backwards compatible. Old particle
systems are being converted to the new system, but will require
tweaking to get them looking the same as before.
Point Cache
===========
The new system to replace manual baking, based on automatic caching
on disk. This is currently used by softbodies and the particle system.
See the Cache API section on:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/BlenderDev/PhysicsSprint
Documentation
=============
These new features still need good docs for the release logs, help
for this is appreciated.
This changes the default behaviour in adding new objects, which has been
discussed for a long time, in person, on the funboard, and in the tracker,
and was agreed to be implemented during the 2.5 release cycle, so here it is.
They have been made default, with preferences to bring back old behaviour since
although people like myself still prefer the new default anyway, it will benefit
new users the most.
The preferences are in the 'Edit Methods' section, changing back to old behaviour
is as simple as a click of a button.
- Switch to edit mode preference
By default, now adding a new object doesn't automatically switch to edit mode.
Not only can this be annoying (most of the time when setting up scenes and models
I don't want to edit it straight away anyway), but it's a major hurdle in the learning
curve that new users have had to deal with at a very early stage.
Blender's different modes are an important part of understanding how the software works
and should have clear behaviour. The problem is that when a user selects something from
the add menu, he's not telling Blender to change modes, he wants to add an object.
But Blender then goes ahead and changes modes underneath him anyway, something that was
never explicitly asked for, something that's unrelated to the mental task at hand, and
fundamentally important to the operation of the software.
We observed plenty of people struggling with this during the training sessions that
we ran during Project Orange, and there's also no shortage of "why can't I select
other objects" questions on the forums.
- Aligned to View preference
Now by default, adding a new object doesn't rotate it so it's aligned facing the view,
but rather, it's remains unrotated in world space. This is something that's more of
a convenience issue (allowing people like me to stop the 'Add->Tab->Alt R dance),
but also makes things easier for new users, especially when doing things like rigging.
For a lot of tools in Blender, like curve deform, path cycling, constraints, it's necessary
for your objects' local axes to be aligned. This requirement isn't that obvious, and I've
had to debug rigs a few times from the animator in our studio, who has everything set up
correctly, but he just happened to be in a different vie at the time he added the object,
so they're misaligned and causing problems. Having all objects get created aligned to
worldspace, by default, makes a lot of these problems go away. It's much more understandable
when rotations are caused by something you've done explicitly, rather than as a side effect
of the software.
For convenience as well, most of the time, when I'm working in context and I decide I need a new object,
particularly working on production scenes that involve more than just one model, an Alt R
is almost always required after adding, since I don't want to have to disrupt the current
view of the scene by switching to top view, just to add an object. It's a bit arbitrary,
the view from which you want to look at your objects isn't usually the way you want them to
be looking at you.
This was caused by an error I made when converting old code during the constraints recode 2. As a result, constraint subtargets got cleared, messing up proxies.
(set_constraint_target didn't use to clear the subtarget of a constraint when passed NULL for the subtarget argument)
Once again, I've recoded the constraints system. This time, the goals were:
* To make it more future-proof by 'modernising' the coding style. The long functions filled with switch statements, have given way to function-pointers with smaller functions for specific purposes.
* To make it support constraints which use multiple targets more readily that it did. In the past, it was assumed that constraints could only have at most one target.
As a result, a lot of code has been shuffled around, and modified. Also, the subversion number has been bumped up.
Known issues:
* PyConstraints, which were the main motivation for supporting multiple-targets, are currently broken. There are some bimport() error that keeps causing problems. I've also temporarily removed the doDriver support, although it may return in another form soon.
* Constraints BPy-API is currently has a few features which currently don't work yet
* Outliner currently only displays the names of the constraints instead of the fancy subtarget/target/constraint-name display it used to do. What gets displayed here needs further investigation, as the old way was certainly not that great (and is not compatible with the new system too)
