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.
linked via material
Textures linked to modifiers are now shown in the AnimEditor channel hierarchy
under object level now (i.e. on same level as ob-data, shapekeys, and object's
action). This makes it possible to edit such animation data without having to
ensure that these textures are also linked to the object's material so that they
will appear.
As a side-effect of how this is implemented, if playback is slower on scenes
following this commit, disable the "modifier" filter under the filtering
settings in the relevant animation editor header. In particular, it may be
beneficial to disable this when you've got scenes with meshes that have many
modifiers (but none of these have any linked data with settings which can be
animated), as Blender will still try to go through all those modifiers checking
for anything to show.
and RNA for it independent of the build flag for enabling Freestyle. Suggested
by Sergey Sharybin through a code review of the branch.
* Many #ifdef WITH_FREESTYLE blocks were removed to always have Freestyle-specific
DNA file specification and RNA for it built in Blender. This will allow Freestyle
setting survive even when a non-Freestyle build is used for loading and saving
files. It is noted that operations are still conditionally built through #ifdef
WITH_FREESTYLE blocks.
* To this end, new blenkernel files BKE_freestyle.h and intern/freestyle.c have
been added. All API functions in FRS_freestyle_config.h as well as some of those
in FRS_freestyle.h were moved to the new files. Now the relocated API functions
have BKE_ prefix instead of FRS_.
Resolved conflicts:
release/datafiles/startup.blend
source/blender/editors/space_nla/nla_buttons.c
Also updated source/blender/blenkernel/intern/linestyle.c as a follow-up of
recent changes for the use of bool.
from Lawrence D'Oliveiro (ldo)
notes from tracker:
use bool for return type from BLI_remlink_safe, necessitating including BLI_utildefines.h in BLI_listbase.h
get rid of duplicate BLI_insertlink, use BLI_insertlinkafter instead.
A few places which were using BLI_insertlinkafter (actually BLI_insertlink), when it would be simpler to use BLI_insertlinkbefore instead.
* Split and moved Cycles’ render layers panels into the render_layer
context as well (would be nice to hide this context when not needed,
e.g. with the BGE, but this is not so easy to do nicely...).
* Fixed some inconsistencies with trunk (probably due to svn merge
glitches) using r52858 as reference. Also recovered the missing
release/bin/blender-softwaregl file.
* A bunch of style code fixes in Blender's own code (not Freestyle
itself yet): line lengths, spaces around operators, block formatting,
headers, etc. In rna_linestyle.c, color_blend_items was replaced by
ramp_blend_items (exported from rna_material.c).
Conflicts resolved:
source/blender/blenloader/intern/readfile.c
source/blender/bmesh/operators/bmo_utils.c
This commit also includes a fix of a bug identified during the merge and committed in revision 51853.
Thanks Thomas (dingto) for the timely fix!
1) "AnimData" is a technical term used for a specific entity in the system.
"anim data" is mangled fluff.
2) Old tooltip for DopeSheet.source is no longer valid. It's nearly always used
to represent the current scene now.
with errors
This filtering option is useful when rigging and you want to figure out if any
of your drivers are not functioning, and/or which one(s) are not, so that you
can go through fixing them. It saves you from having to check on each one
individually, or going into the console to try to infer which ones are not
working.
Colors used by Bone Groups are now copied/assigned to Action Groups too when
they're created now. This completes the work started in r.46960 to restore this
functionality from 2.48.
Currently, there is no control over when/whether these colors are copied over
(although it is possible to disable the display of these colors for relevant
animation editors if desired). Originally I was going to make this a more
generic Keying Sets feature, though that turned out to be a bit too complex to
manage.
Other notes:
* Split out the code for copying colors to a common library function
This commit restores the group colours support for F-Curves and F-Curve Groups
in the DopeSheet and Graph Editors. Currently the relevant settings for groups
are only exposed via RNA, but a followup commit will add support for
automatically setting these colours. By default, DopeSheet and Graph Editors are
set to display these colours if/when they are available.
This functionality used to be in 2.48, and is a useful mechanism for visually
distinguishing between channels for different controls when animating (if group
colours are used on the rigs too).
can type in any value, and only when sliding the number value there is a limit.
It was already possible to assign any value to a socket with node linking, so
this shouldn't cause any new issues.
Also raised the limits on the math nodes, with a patch by Agustin Benavidez.
Note about long lines: I did not touch to two pieces of code (because I don’t see any way to keep a nicely formated, compact code, with shorter lines):
* The node types definitions into rna_nodetree_types.h
* The vgroup name functions into rna_particle.c
