First note that this is new functionality, unfinished, and only for
testing and feedback purposes. I'll list below what works, and what will
need work still.
This text is also in cms: http://www.blender.org/cms/Ipo_Drivers.680.0.html
An IpoDriver is like an IpoCurve, but instead of a Bezier curve, it allows
to connect a property of other Objects as input for the "channel". For
example, IpoDrivers can be used to have a Shape Key being "driven" by
the rotation of a Bone. Or the RGB colors of a Material get driven by the
XYZ location of an Object.
Editing of Drivers happens in the IpoWindow. Here you can notice that the
channels (right hand window) now have an "active" channel indicator.
To add a Driver, you have to use the "Transform Properties" Panel (Nkey).
Here you can add or remove a Driver to the active channel, and use the
buttons to fill in what kind of relationship you want to establish.
Driver Objects
Note that any Ipo Channel can become driven now, but that only Object
transformation or Pose Bone transformation can be used to become a
Driver now.
At this moment, only the local transformation is taken into account.
For Objects that means the location/rotation/scale value without Parent
transform (as shown in "Transform Properties" Panel for Objects).
For Pose Bones it means that only the Pose transform (changes of rest
position) is Driver information (also as shown in Transform Property
Panel in Pose Mode).
Mapping of Drivers
When an Ipo Channel is "driven", the mapping is by default one-to-one.
It is only restricted by already built-in limits for Channels, like
for Material the "R" value can only range from 0.0 to 1.0.
Also note that when mapping rotations, the actual rotation values
in Ipos are scaled down with a factor 10.0. (180 degrees actually has
in the Ipo system a value of 18.0). This is an ancient year zero
convention in Blender... it is a bit hidden, because the ruler
(vertical as well as horizontal) displays the virtual values correctly.
Only the Properties panel shows the actual value.
When you draw an IpoCurve in a Driven channel, this curve will define
the mapping between the Driver output (horizontal) and Driven input
(vertical, as usual).
A nice new option to use is "Insert one-to-one curve" (press I-key,
or in pulldown menu). This will also zoom the display in exactly to
fill the window, allowing easy edit. If you use this option with
degrees, it will map 180 degree rotation to a range of 1.0 unit.
Live updates
Since the Drivers are integrated in the Ipo system, they will always
be updated whenever an Ipo is evaluated. This happens at least on
frame changes.
For interactive feedback, updates while transforming objects were
added in these cases:
- Driven Object Ipos, by other Objects or Pose Bones
- Driven Shape Key Ipos, by other Objects or Pose Bones
You can also insert Drivers on Action Ipos, but these are only evaluated
on frame change now.
Todo
- Drivers can also get a text button, allowing a 1 line Python script
to be executed.
- Make UI for it a bit less hidden... maybe with visualization in 3D?
- Allowing global transform coordinates as Driver too.
Issues
- renaming Bones won't rename drivers
- (file) appending the Ipo won't append the linked driver Objects
Minor modifications to simplify the code in evaluate_constraint.
The "Stick" feature will need more work as it gives bad results when skipping frames, jumping around on the timeline and when going backward in time.
Suggestion: Would be nice if it could use the local space too, not just global space planes.
Full logs for changes will be added later. Worth to note now;
- support for 'tree IK' added
- DOF and stiffness per IK bone (in pose only)
- Orientation IK support (target rotates -> chain follows)
This is still WIP. Buttons might change, button ranges will change, and the
way 'IK groups' are working will change. You can play with this, but don't
expect saved files to work still by end of this day! :)
Main target was cleanup of editconstraint.c and removal of the ugly
ob->activecon (active constraint channel), which was set by the "Show"
button in the Constraint Panel.
Better is to introduce an 'Active Constraint' itself, which stores in
the Constraint itself. By using this setting, and by checking the active
Bone, the UI can update reliably now. This only shows now in IpoWindow
btw (for constraint ipos). The active Constraint is drawn in the Buttons
with a slightly brighter backdrop. Any action in that Panel selects a
constraint now (even click in backdrop).
So now we have pose channels & constraint channels nicely behaving. Now the
darn Action channels... :)
Further in this commit:
- interface.c: Button ROUNDBOX now does button callback too.
Button NUMSLI didn't do the callback on a click only
- Cleaned up include files in yafray, got annoyed it compiled over all the
time.
- removed unused variables from Constraint struct
- Added option to the IK buttons, to have it use the 'tip' as end of the
IK chain. I never really understood this old convention (IK didn't work
on the Bone itself).
Old files still will read OK though. But I made the "To Tip" a default
when adding new IK constraints.
- Hotkey CTRL+I: add IK, with option to have it adding an Empty target,
or use a selected Bone as target. With the new non-modal PoseMode, it
gives instant access to playing with the IK chain.
- Hotkey ALT+I: clears IK, on all selected Bones
- Hotkey ALT+C: clears Constraints on all selected Bones (incl IK)
- With Actions on a Pose, ESC in transform restored wrong.
This is solved similar to ipos now, storing a 'last time evaluated'.
Could be extended to ghosting... soon.
- Moving the little yellow 'key blocks' in Action window didn't update
3d window. ALso the 'lock' option didn't work, and flashed header.
- Pose Transform: noticed there were still errors in cases, especially
with actions. Painfully tried to build the desired matrix now.
- Removed obsolete Bone pointer from TransData
Fix for previous commit today; found other test file with action
constraint that behaved different... found out the old action constraint
used the deform matrix (from restpos to pose) to define the key.
ALso removed unused function from outliner.c
it used the 'global' (Pose Space) rotation to define the action timing.
That was of course hardly useful, reason for many weird patched rigs.
Nevertheless, sometimes it can be useful, and it's nice to see old files
nicely work still. So: "Local" is an option now.
Note: if you changed last week files because of the new action constraint,
set the new "Local" option in the object-buttons Constraint panel.
weird disabled code that was hanging out there for ages.
Also cleaned up NLA blending itself, it was copying far too much data
around. Should be three times faster or so... need good test!
And restored Action Baking.
actually) only the relative rotation is used.
- Added scale=1.0 initializer in saving files, this fixes a little bit
better upward compatibility
- Still there are cases where bones flip 180 degrees when you read it with
older Blenders... not sure what it is caused by
Aim was to get a total refresh of the animation system. This
is needed because;
- we need to upgrade it with 21st century features
- current code is spaghetti/hack combo, and hides good design
- it should become lag-free with using dependency graphs
A full log, with complete code API/structure/design explanation
will follow, that's a load of work... so here below the list with
hot changes;
- The entire object update system (matrices, geometry) is now
centralized. Calls to where_is_object and makeDispList are
forbidden, instead we tag objects 'changed' and let the
depgraph code sort it out
- Removed all old "Ika" code
- Depgraph is aware of all relationships, including meta balls,
constraints, bevelcurve, and so on.
- Made depgraph aware of relation types and layers, to do smart
flushing of 'changed' events. Nothing gets calculated too often!
- Transform uses depgraph to detect changes
- On frame-advance, depgraph flushes animated changes
Armatures;
Almost all armature related code has been fully built from scratch.
It now reveils the original design much better, with a very clean
implementation, lag free without even calculating each Bone more than
once. Result is quite a speedup yes!
Important to note is;
1) Armature is data containing the 'rest position'
2) Pose is the changes of rest position, and always on object level.
That way more Objects can use same Pose. Also constraints are in Pose
3) Actions only contain the Ipos to change values in Poses.
- Bones draw unrotated now
- Drawing bones speedup enormously (10-20 times)
- Bone selecting in EditMode, selection state is saved for PoseMode,
and vice-versa
- Undo in editmode
- Bone renaming does vertexgroups, constraints, posechannels, actions,
for all users of Armature in entire file
- Added Bone renaming in NKey panel
- Nkey PoseMode shows eulers now
- EditMode and PoseMode now have 'active' bone too (last clicked)
- Parenting in EditMode' CTRL+P, ALT+P, with nice options!
- Pose is added in Outliner now, with showing that constraints are in
the Pose, not Armature
- Disconnected IK solving from constraints. It's a separate phase now,
on top of the full Pose calculations
- Pose itself has a dependency graph too, so evaluation order is lag free.
TODO NOW;
- Rotating in Posemode has incorrect inverse transform (Martin will fix)
- Python Bone/Armature/Pose API disabled... needs full recode too
(wait for my doc!)
- Game engine will need upgrade too
- Depgraph code needs revision, cleanup, can be much faster!
(But, compliments for Jean-Luc, it works like a charm!)
- IK changed, it now doesnt use previous position to advance to next
position anymore. That system looks nice (no flips) but is not well
suited for NLA and background render.
TODO LATER;
We now can do loadsa new nifty features as well; like:
- Kill PoseMode (can be option for armatures itself)
- Make B-Bones (Bezier, Bspline, like for spines)
- Move all silly button level edit to 3d window (like CTRL+I = add
IK)
- Much better & informative drawing
- Fix action/nla editors
- Put all ipos in Actions (object, mesh key, lamp color)
- Add hooks
- Null bones
- Much more advanced constraints...
Bugfixes;
- OGL render (view3d header) had wrong first frame on anim render
- Ipo 'recording' mode had wrong playback speed
- Vertex-key mode now sticks to show 'active key', until frame change
-Ton-
Read today's meeting minutes for a description.
Bjornmose: We'll need some example and screenshots for the dev pages of blender3d.org. If you can do some, neat, if not, I'll do them.
Matt, Emilie and Chris: Please review UI addition. Pixel alignement and all that fun stuff has not be overly looked for (though I did some cleaning by adding alignment blocks).
Moved get_con_target from editconstraint to constraint kernel file and renamed to get_constraint_target
Make scene.c use constraint functions from kernel instead of doing the switch itself (regrouping specific constraint code in one file).
Add LockTrack as an option in the Make Track menu (Ctrl-T)
Adding fun for vortex forces in 3D window, the representation now match the orientation and direction of the force (this is code will need optimisation). I'll probably be slapped for mixing two things in one commit but some function calls needed to be fixed for the new spelling and since this is really isolated code I didn't feel like wasting time getting a fresh copy, doing the changes and then readded this after commiting.
Fixed some warning regarding implicit casts and constants (this last one is a MSVCism where you need to explicitely tell the compiler to use floats with an f. AFAIK, it doesn't affect/bother other compilers).
Removed a useless commented piece of code in readfile (there was an uncommented copy a couple of lines before)
* Armatures that had constraint targets inside other armatures
weren't transform()-ing correctly
* Issues with lattice deformed objects that are parents of bones
when rendering an animation. Seems to be mostly OK now with the
exception of the first rendered frame -- weird bugs like this have
plagued blender for ages, which leads me to believe that
RE_rotateBlenderScene() is a piece of garbage that nobody understands
(especially me).
* made a few helper functions to clean up some repeated code related
to clearing constraint status and rebuilding displists.
This is a temporary fix, but a complete fix will require a rewrite of of some part of the where_is_object function, and that would take too much time before 2.31.
This is done by disabling the object position refresh call when calculating these constraints. From the tests I did, this doesn't cause any problem at all.
The main point of this is to create pistons and the like.
For coders:
the detect_constraint_loop function now takes an additional parameter that determines the constraint type of the object it's looping from.
Axis options for TrackTo
LockTrack
FollowPath
Auto creation of TrackTo constraint from Ctrl-T (old track still an option)
Auto creation of FollowPath when parenting to path (Normal parent still an option)
Backward compatibility stuff to convert the per object axis settings to per constraint when a Track constraint is present.
Function to convert old track to constraint (commented out)
Revamped the constraints interface with Matt's work from tuhopuu and the stuff we were discussing earlier.
--------------------
For coders:
unique_constraint_name and *new_constraint_data moved to the kernel (constraint.c)
new Projf function in arithb gives the projection of a vector on another vector
add_new_constraint now takes a constraint type (int) parameter
add_constraint_to_object(bConstraint *con, Object *ob) to link a constraint to an object
add_constraint_to_client(bConstraint *con) to link constraint to current client (object or bone)
add_influence_key_to_constraint (bConstraint *con) to (eventually) add a keyframe to the influence IPO of a constraint
