This commit started out aiming to make the "Stepped" F-Modifier (committed last night) even more useful, but ended up fixing a few other finer-points of how F-Modifiers work.
Firstly, the new stuff:
I've addded options to the Stepped F-Modifier to not affect frames before and/or after specified values, and renamed the 'start offset' to 'offset' for clarity.
The main objective of this is to allow Stepped F-Modifiers to only affect certain time ranges, so that by layering/using multiple instances of the F-Modifier, it can be possible to have multiple stepping-sizes.
This allows for effects like:
http://www.pasteall.org/blend/2230
or in words, it provides a convenient mechanism for animators to specify whether sections of the animation is shown "on twos", "fours", or even "forty-second-ths plus a smidgen", as can be easily done with 2D.
Assorted changes to support this:
* Properly fixed up how F-Modifiers that work with time, evaluate the time to evaluate the curve at. Now layered time effects like this should be possible in a much nicer way.
* Added proper value range validation/clamping to many properties. There are still a lot more that need checking, but at least more properties now do "the right thing".
* Copy/Paste operators for F-Modifiers
Available in Graph and NLA Editors. Use the Copy/Paste buttons beside the 'Add Modifier' buttons.
Copy copies all the modifiers of the ACTIVE F-Curve or Strip depending on the editor.
Paste pastes modifiers from the buffer to all the selected F-Curves or Strips, adding the new modifiers to the ends of each list.
* 'Stepped Interpolation' F-Modifier
This modifier holds each interpolated value from the F-Curve for several frames without changing the timing.
This allows to preview motions 'on-twos' for example without altering the timing, or having to go through setting heaps of keyframes. In this case, Andy wanted to use this for CG <-> StopMo.
* Removing duplicate api functions
* Shuffled around newly added api functions to make the ordering more consistent
* Fixes for a few bugs in the api functions as I checked over them
* Replaced most of the #defines for flags and modes with enums
- renamed .add() to .new() for rna collection functions since they dont add an existing item.
- remove 'name' as an argument from the new driver target function, better to keep the api minimal and let scripters use the data api for editing values after.
- added some api functions to keep rna api from becoming a mess.
* Convert all code to use new functions.
* Branch maintainers may want to skip this commit, and run this
conversion script instead, if they use a lot of math functions
in new code:
http://www.pasteall.org/9052/python
* #19727: Noise modifier does nothing with size 1.0
When the 'Size' and 'Phase' parameters were both 1.0 exactly, and evaltime was an integer (as is the case when doing animation evaluation but not for Graph Editor drawing), the noise calculation function was bailing out. Now, the 'z' component supplied to this function is a decimal value (hardcoded to 0.1 after experimentation) to try and avoid this situation.
* Graph Editor 'Bake' operator was using wrong poll callback, making it useless when trying to use it on a F-Curve that only has modifiers on it (i.e. the main use case of the operator!)
* F-Modifier API is now in its own file in blenkernel
* Renamed and refactored these so that they're no dependent on F-Curves, since all they really used was the fcu->modifiers list
* Added missing license blocks to a few files
