A mesh can consist out of multiple material. Take a character with clothing's. the skin can be a different material as the different clothing's. During compositing it is a common use-case to only do a part of the composit on only a specific material. Currently this can not be done.
In blender movies this feature is known to be implemented, but until now it never got integrated into trunk.
Proposal
With material index the Blender internal renderer will be capable of creating a buffer containing the material indexes of the first pixel-hit. This will be implemented in the same manner as the object index.
In the compositor the ID Mask node can be used to extract the information out of the Render pass.
Impact
User interface
On the properties-space the next changes will be done
Scene⇒Render layer⇒Passes⇒Material index will be added
Material⇒Options⇒Pass index will be added
DNA
Material struct will get an new field called “index”. this will be a short-type.
Material struct the field pad will be removed.
A new Render-layer pass will be added (bit 1«18)
RNA
Material RNA is updated (based on “pass index” from object)
Render layer RNA is updated (based on IndexOB)
Blender internal renderer
The Blender internal renderer will process the render pass as a copy of the Object index.
Blender compositor
The render layer input will get a new output socket called “IndexMA”
Usage
An example on how to use material index can be found at:
https://svn.blender.org/svnroot/bf-blender/trunk/lib/tests/compositing/composite_materialindex.blend
This is also example of a commit message longer than the commit itself :)
Animation Editor toggle tweaks:
* By popular request, curve visibility toggles in the Graph Editor are
now represented using the eyeball icons
* Muting is now represented by a speaker icon (a speaker for this
purpose seems fairly common?)
New icons:
* Keying Sets now have their own icons (as found in a proposal on
jendrzych's "Pixel Sized" blog)
* Drivers also have their own icon now. This is just a hacky one I've
devised which doesn't look that great. Suggestions on this are very
welcome.
== Datablock filters in the headers are now hidden by default ==
This has been done because users were generally not frequently
toggling these, so quick access vs screen-estate cost wasn't really
worth it to have these always showing and taking up space on the
header.
Usage notes:
- To show these again, click on the "Filter more..." toggle.
- The "Filter more..." button DOES NOT affect whether those filters
apply.
Design notes:
- I tried many other button/icon combinations, but those were either
too space-hogging, vague, or had wrong button order.
- I also tried putting a box around these, but there was too much
padding.
- The ordering of the filters has also been modified a bit so that the
group/fcurve-name filters occur earlier in the list, given that
they're used more frequently
== Graph Editor - Use Fancy Drawing ==
Renamed this option to "Use High Quality Drawing" as suggested by
Matt. "Fancy" isn't really descriptive enough.
== Icons for Mode Dropdowns ==
The mode dropdowns in the DopeSheet and Graph Editors now have icons.
- These were important enough (compared to the auto-snap mode) that
some visual decoration was perhaps warranted.
- It makes it easier to see at a glance what mode the view is in
Icon choices:
- In some cases, the icons seem like quite a natural fit IMO (i.e.
outliner<->dopesheet, key<->shapekey editor, grease pencil, fcurve
editor)
- Action Editor uses an "object" icon to indicate that this is object-
level only for now (though I hope to find a way to address this
soon/later). This will be kept like this until then.
- There isn't any icon for drivers, so after trying a few
alternatives, I settled on area-link icon, since it ties together two
entities using some link.
modified auto-completion, though this may need to become a preference.
The problem is:
- including _all_ text as a prefix can take a lot of space, and isnt too readable.
- including only the previous word is error prone because detecting delimiters can fail when editing strings.
so I've set it to only include the last part of the string but align to the cursor to make it more readable.
Toggling options on the selection is better done as a generic operator.
Replace ARMATURE_OT_flags_set and POSE_OT_flags_set with WM_OT_context_collection_boolean_set and use menus to access it with specific settings.
This way its easy make a key shortcut which toggles any boolean on any collection - sequences, metaballs, objects, bones etc.
- comment/remove assignments from values to themselves.
- add case break statements (no functional change but some source code checkers notice).
- fix python errors when the sculpt brush is None.
In addition the billboards can be scaled by the particle velocity with optional head and tail factors (similar to line drawing options). This allows for pseudo-motionblur effects.
- Sequencer dynamics: Now it's possible to change the output channels and the resampling quality also increased (previously maximum quality was 44,1 kHz)
- Changed two buffers to use ffmpeg allocation, not sure if that helps somehow.
