Now the name/collection filters run when there's some text,
and don't run when the box is empty, thus reducing an extra
step that was needed before these options could be used.
This commit is an experiment in using popovers as a place to house some
of the filtering options for animation editors, in line with what's taking
place in the Outliner with the filtering popover there too.
Right now, the most frequently used/changed options are still available
on the headers (i.e. the "Only Selected"/"Hidden"/search fields), while
everything else (i.e. the per-datablock filters, which were already hidden
behind a collapsed-toggle button before) now live in the popover.
- Added flexible separators to
Clip, Graph, Dopesheet, Image, Node, Timeline, 3D View.
- Added graying out for Proportional Editing
menus to avoid popping when right-aligned.
- Slightly re-arranged some controls,
so they can be on correct side of the separators.
Patch by @billreynish
D3458 by @billreynish w/ edits.
- Context menu for dope-sheet, graph, image & node editors.
- Add type to contenxt menu header.
- Access with W-Key.
- Change UV-editor weld key binding to Shift-W.
OVERVIEW
* In 2.7 terminology, all layers and groups are now collection datablocks.
* These collections are nestable, linkable, instanceable, overrideable, ..
which opens up new ways to set up scenes and link + override data.
* Viewport/render visibility and selectability are now a part of the collection
and shared across all view layers and linkable.
* View layers define which subset of the scene collection hierarchy is excluded
for each. For many workflows one view layer can be used, these are more of an
advanced feature now.
OUTLINER
* The outliner now has a "View Layer" display mode instead of "Collections",
which can display the collections and/or objects in the view layer.
* In this display mode, collections can be excluded with the right click menu.
These will then be greyed out and their objects will be excluded.
* To view collections not linked to any scene, the "Blender File" display mode
can be used, with the new filtering option to just see Colleciton datablocks.
* The outliner right click menus for collections and objects were reorganized.
* Drag and drop still needs to be improved. Like before, dragging the icon or
text gives different results, we'll unify this later.
LINKING AND OVERRIDES
* Collections can now be linked into the scene without creating an instance,
with the link/append operator or from the collections view in the outliner.
* Collections can get static overrides with the right click menu in the outliner,
but this is rather unreliable and not clearly communicated at the moment.
* We still need to improve the make override operator to turn collection instances
into collections with overrides directly in the scene.
PERFORMANCE
* We tried to make performance not worse than before and improve it in some
cases. The main thing that's still a bit slower is multiple scenes, we have to
change the layer syncing to only updated affected scenes.
* Collections keep a list of their parent collections for faster incremental
updates in syncing and caching.
* View layer bases are now in a object -> base hash to avoid quadratic time
lookups internally and in API functions like visible_get().
VERSIONING
* Compatibility with 2.7 files should be improved due to the new visibility
controls. Of course users may not want to set up their scenes differently
now to avoid having separate layers and groups.
* Compatibility with 2.8 is mostly there, and was tested on Eevee demo and Hero
files. There's a few things which are know to be not quite compatible, like
nested layer collections inside groups.
* The versioning code for 2.8 files is quite complicated, and isolated behind
#ifdef so it can be removed at the end of the release cycle.
KNOWN ISSUES
* The G-key group operators in the 3D viewport were left mostly as is, they
need to be modified still to fit better.
* Same for the groups panel in the object properties. This needs to be updated
still, or perhaps replaced by something better.
* Collections must all have a unique name. Less restrictive namespacing is to
be done later, we'll have to see how important this is as all objects within
the collections must also have a unique name anyway.
* Full scene copy and delete scene are exactly doing the right thing yet.
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D3383https://code.blender.org/2018/05/collections-and-groups/
For many years, animators have been requesting the ability to edit keyframes in the
timeline. However, implementing such tools in the timeline quickly becomes a slippery
slope, where we'll eventually end up having to duplicate all the functionality from the
dopesheet editor.
Discussing with William and Pablo this morning, we realised that perhaps it might be possible
to just make the Timeline a mode of the Dopesheet Editor (and kill off the old standalone
Timeline), meaning that we essentially get all the Dopesheet Editor goodness for free!
Also, with some proposed UI updates (i.e. allowing "submodes" of editors to be part of the
the main editors selector), it might not even matter that there isn't an "actual" timeline
editor anymore.
This commit implements the following changes (which are actually sufficient for supporting
most basic workflows):
* Timeline mode in Dopesheet Editor
* Tweaks to UI code to make the Timeline header/menus show up in Dopesheet editor
TODO:
* Hide channels list when switching to timeline mode
* Port over cache-file indicators
* Add missing timeline-only settings that need a new home in the dopesheet
* Go through fixing all timeline editor operators (e.g. Bind to camera)
* Port over start/end frame shading (and adjust preview range rendering to make the
distinction between these clear)
* Remove old timeline editor, and transfer over any leftover code
Although this wasn't so obvious since it
only showed up for factory settings and in the preferences window.
Panel display order depends on registration order,
Sorry for the noise. On the bright side we no longer need to move
classes around to re-arrange panels.
A long requested feature has been to have objects appear in alphabetical order
in the animation editors, so that it is easier to find where they occur. This
commit implements support for this.
The main sticking point has been the performance impact of having this sorting
happening all the time (as the actual list of "bases" cannot be modified, as the
old depsgraph still needs random-looking unsorted order of objects for scheduling
updates). However, it recently occurred to me that perhaps by restricting it to
the one case where the ordering actually matters (i.e. when we're getting the channel
list for drawing all channels, vs operating on them), and adding a toggle to turn the
sorting off in heavy scenes when it might bog down things, that it will probably
be acceptable enough in general. Furthermore, if things get really bad, we can investigate
putting in place some sort of caching scheme for this too - though hopefully the
new depsgraph will make that unnecessary (i.e. it doesn't sort the bases directly anymore).
This only works in the Action and Dopesheet modes (which operate on FCurve keyframes).
Support for Grease Pencil and Mask Keyframes though is still pending.
This commit adds some of the initial support for a properties region in the
Action Editor. There are currently no panels to display, as there is still
a lot of work required to port over the required internal architecture to
support the panels seen in the Graph Editor.
Thanks to D1080 by @rockets, I've now been able to easily implement the
ability to type multiple word snippets/partial words into the text filter
field (in the Animation Editors), and have it filter the channels which
contain just some of those parts (instead of having to match everything).
For example, the following search strings will now work:
* "loc rot" or "lo ro" will now filter all location and rotation FCurves
* "col loc" will filter all location and color FCurves
* "scale" will also work as before to filter all scale FCurves
But, the following will not work:
* "lc rt" will NOT filter all location and rotation, as the fuzzy search only
breaks down the search string based on whitespace placement
By default, this is not enabled when using name filtering (i.e. magnifying glass is checked,
and some filtering text is specified). Instead, you need to enable the "AZ" toggle beside
the name field. This fuzzy matching is not enabled by default as it could end up being
quite a bit slower on really heavy scenes. (There are probably some optimisation
opportunities, but that's only a future option if someone really needs it)
Basically it's a clean keyframes tool, but also removes a channel if the
only remaining keyframe has the default value only and is not used by
drivers or generative modifiers.
It's was used to help with performance of keyframe-heavy scenes in
gooseberry.
Note, as always the curve left after the clean tool is used is not the
same as the original, so this tool is better used before doing custom
editing of fcurves and after initial keyframe insertion, to get rid
of any unwanted keyframes inserted while doing mass keyframe insertion
(by selecting all bones and pressing I for instance)
There are a few things here which are not so nice:
* Position of proportional edit circle is not centered on data
(difficult to predict positions here since those are completely custom,
will probably be positioned at center of area later instead)
* Result is flushed to curve handles only at the end of the transform,
so if people have the graph editor open they will see handles lagging behind.
After looking into this more carefully, I've found that we do in fact need a dedicate
operator to add some custom logic when trying to unlink an action from the editor/datablocks.
Specifically, this new operator does the following:
1) When in Tweak Mode, it shouldn't be possible to unlink the active action,
or else, everything turns to custard.
2) If the Action doesn't have any other users, the user should at least get
a warning that it is going to get lost.
3) We need a convenient way to exit Tweak Mode from the Action Editor
4) If none of the above apply, we can just unlink normally
This commit implements this for the Action Editor, with stubs for the NLA Editor too.
Those will be fixed next.
It turned out that the constantly changing width of the datablock selector
made it a pain to use these to quickly toggle between different actions,
as the buttons would keep jumping around, thus leading to errors when
quickly toggling between actions. This way doesn't look quite as great,
but should be more usable.
With this feature, it is now possible to quickly switch between different actions
stacked/stashed on top of each other in the NLA Stack without having to go to the
NLA Editor and doing a tab-select-tab dance, thus saving quite a few clicks. It
was specifically designed with Game Animation / Action Library workflows in mind,
but also helps layered animation workflows.
Usage:
Simply click on the up/down arrow buttons (between the action datablock selector
and the pushdown/stash buttons) to go to the action in the NLA Track above/below
the NLA Strip being whose action is being tweaked in the Action Editor.
Notes:
- These still work when you're not editing the action used by a NLA Strip.
If you're just animating a new action normally, it is possible to use the "down arrow"
to temporarily jump down to the previous action without losing the new action you're
working on, and then use the "up arrow" to get back to it once you're done checking
the other action(s).
- If there are multiple actions/strips on the same layer/track, then only the one
closest to the current frame will be used.
This commit is an experiment exploring the relationship between the action
management buttons (i.e. action selector + pushdown/stash, and soon a few others)
and the filtering stuff (i.e. summary, only selected, etc.)
The old ordering meant that the filtering stuff was consistently in the same
place beside the mode selector, meaning that the order was "common stuff, then
editor specific stuff", this was not that great on smaller windows, where there
important stuff was often out of view.
This new order places greater emphasis on the parts which are likely to be more
important. It also allows us to have a better hierarchy/flow; this is especially
because we'll soon introduce a way to specify which datablock "level" the
action comes from, so going from "level -> action -> filters within action" will
make more sense.
This commit modifies the "New Action" operator to always stash the old action
before it creates a new one. As a result, the old active action will now have
a proper user of sorts after the new one is created, preventing previously
created actions from being lost.
Now that the New operator does this, it can be used for the Action Editor header AND
NLA Editor (Animation Data Panel -> Active Action) again. The "stash and create"
operator is somewhat redundant at this point as a result.
In constrast to the old "new" operator, this operator will stash the existing action
in the stack to prevent it from being lost. This situation isn't totally ideal yet,
since the NLA Editor still calls the old method.
I'm still not sure which version is better, but I suspect that with the labels,
this might help users figure this out more than if they were just unlabelled
icon buttons...
This operator (the snowflake icon, beside the pushdown button on the Action Editor
header) adds the currently active action to the NLA stack in a muted track, then
creates + loads a new action ready to be populated with new keyframes.
Since the NLA is being used to hang on to all the actions here, no actions are
getting lost.
Usage Notes (there will be some additional tweaks to make this nicer):
* To preview different actions that have been "stashed", simply click the "Solo"
toggle for the track containing the action in question. Playing back the NLA will
now show the stashed track
* To edit a previously stashed action - simply enter tweakmode on it in the NLA
while the "Solo" toggle is enabled.
Todo:
* Add some more operators here to polish up the Action <-> NLA bridge to make the
layered and stash workflows smoother. Examples include some tools to easily
switch between the different actions layers in the stack, as well as making it
easier to get out of tweakmode (and sync up the action lengths)
* Review and cleanup the behaviour of the "new" operator here to avoid the old
problems that users were running into
* After the next release - Implement the full Action Libraries functionality, with
ways to bridge the stashed strips over to a full-blown library.
This commit exposes the "Push Down" button/functionality found in the NLA Editor
to the Action Editor, so that actions can be added NLA Stack from here too. The
main point of this for now is to make the whole layered-animation workflow nicer
more efficient, but not requiring the second editor be visible in common cases.
It also conveniently sets things up for the next few changes (already hinted at
here)...
For now, did most of the changes in menu entries (i.e. py space UI scripts).
Note we do not get 100% same results as previously, but current situation is
globally better than previous one, though the whole system to retrieve shortcuts
remains a bit weak...
and graph editor.
This was a tricky commit that was not so straightforward to make work.
The information for bones is not easy to come by in the animation curves,
however we do have some string manipulation tricks to make it happen.
Testing in gooseberry worked for the rigs there, commiting to master now
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.
