This commit adds a new menu entry - "Edit Driver" - the RMB menu that
will show a popover panel displaying the settings for the driver you
activated the menu item on. This shows the popover panel defined in
yesterday's commit (GRAPH_PT_drivers_popover).
It is possible to edit the driver settings from this panel now.
However, do be warned that the functionality presented is highly
WIP still. There are some unresolved issues, such as:
- The popover disappears too easily on any mouse movements/clicks
on anything, making the panel less useful right now than it should.
- The layout still needs refining. Currently the layout that's there
is a bit of a placeholder until we can play around with it a bit
more to see/feel what feels good/right or what is too much.
- The "Open Drivers Editor" on the bottom of the panel doesn't work.
There are some tricky context tricky things that need to happen here
to make that case work, since the operator button won't have the necessary
context info.
* Remove "Show Debug Info" option. Everyone has it turned on all the time,
since it's just useful to have
* Make the "Remove Driver" button less prominent. It doesn't happen that much,
so it shouldn't take up as much room
* Make "expressions" textbox wider (i.e. taking up the whole column width)
by separating the label and textbox on separate lines.
* Rename "Add Variable" button to make it clearer to users what "variables"
may be (i.e. they serve as a way to specify Inputs, just like adding a
"Source Data" node in a nodetree)
* Regroup buttons
The legacy algorithm only considers two adjacent points when computing
the bezier handles, which cannot produce satisfactory results. Animators
are often forced to manually adjust all curves.
The new approach instead solves a system of equations to trace a cubic spline
with continuous second derivative through the whole segment of auto points,
delimited at ends by keyframes with handles set by other requirements.
This algorithm also adjusts Vector handles that face ordinary bezier keyframes
to achieve zero acceleration at the Vector keyframe, instead of simply pointing
it at the adjacent point.
Original idea and implementation by Benoit Bolsee <benoit.bolsee@online.be>;
code mostly rewritten to improve code clarity and extensibility.
Reviewers: aligorith
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2884
Cyclic extrapolation is implemented as an f-curve modifier, so this
technically violates abstraction separation and is something of a hack.
However without such behavior achieving smooth looping with cyclic
extrapolation is extremely cumbersome.
The new behavior is applied when the first modifier is Cyclic
extrapolation in Repeat or Repeat with Offset mode without
using influence, repeat count or range restrictions.
This change in behavior means that curve handles have to be updated
when the modifier is added, removed or its options change. Due to the
way code is structured, it seems it requires a helper link to the
containing curve from the modifier object.
Reviewers: aligorith
Differential Revision: https://developer.blender.org/D2783
The create drivers operator should not use the "Transform Channel" variable type
when driving one transform with another on the same object/bone. Otherwise, you
end up with a situation which technically results in a bit of a pseudo-dependency
cycle.
* Knock out "Python" FModifier entry - It really hasn't been coded yet!
* Add icon for "Match Indices" driver eyedropper mode. It should help provide
a bit more of a hint of what it does, but it also doesn't look quite as nice now.
This was a feature request from a few years back (IIRC from ZanQdo?) to make it
easier to reuse one set of driver variables across several different drivers.
Dev Notes:
* Finally it's done! All that trouble for two little buttons.
* Grr... cmake... grrr!
* This includes the "manually create" modes, which correspond to the previous behaviour
for setting up drivers. This is necessary when the current screen layout is not
well suited to having multiple property editors open (e.g. small screen or heavily
subdivided screen).
* Only the modes relevant for the current property type (i.e. array vs single)
will be shown
* The "Add Driver" entries in the RMB context menu have now been replaced by a
submenu which will list all the available mapping types.
* NOTE: The code for the ANIM_OT_button_driver_add() operator is perhaps a bit hairy.
However, it currently allows us to have the desired behaviour. It can always get
cleaned up later though.
When linking a rotation property to a non-rotation property (going in either
direction - i.e. rot -> normal, normal -> rot), the driver expression will
now be set so that the new drivers behave as expected (i.e. you get the values
you see, instead of "weird" values that seem several orders of magnitude off).
This may not be that great for everyone (i.e. the rare users out there who
actually like to look at their rotations in radians), but they usually know
what they're doing anyway, so this will be easy to correct.
Although it isn't currently exposed, this allows for the old behaviour,
where an "empty" driver was added (without any target assigned yet).
For this reason, it's also referred to as the "Manual" mode.
There are also some attempts at improving the tooltips + names for the
other modes (again, not shown anywhere yet)
This commit brings some long requested improvements to the workflow for setting up
drivers, which should make it easier and faster to set up new drivers in a more
interactive fashion.
The new workflow is as follows:
1) Hover over the property (e.g. "Lamp Energy" or "Y Location") or properties ("Rotation")
you wish to add drivers to. We'll refer to this as the "destination"
2) Ctrl-D to active the new "Add Drivers" eyedropper
3) Click on the property you want to use as the source/target. The property under the
mouse will be used to drive the property you invoked Ctrl-D on.
For example, to drive the X, Y, and Z location of the Cube using the Y Location of the Lamp,
hover over any of the X/Y/Z location buttons, hit Ctrl-D, then click on the Y-Location
button of the Lamp object. Drivers will be added to the X, Y, and Z Location properties
of the Cube; each driver will have a single variable, which uses the Y-Location Transform
Channel of the Lamp.
Tips:
- Transform properties will automatically create "Transform Channel" driver variables.
Everything else will use "Single Property" ones
- Due to the way that Blender's UI Context works, you'll need two Properties Panel instances
open (and to have pinned one of the two to show the properties for the unselected
object). It's slightly clunky, but necessary for implementing a workflow like this,
as the UI cannot be manipulated while using eyedroppers to pick data.
- The eyedropper operator implemented here actually has three modes of operation.
1) The "1-N" (one to many) mode is the default used for Ctrl-D, and "Add Driver to All"
in the RMB Menu. This is the behaviour described above.
2) There's also a "1-1" (one to one) mode that is used for the "Add Single Driver" in the
RMB Menu.
3) Finally, there's the "N-N" mode (many to many), which isn't currently exposed.
The point of this is to allow mapping XYZ to XYZ elementwise (i.e. direct copying)
which is useful for things like locations, rotations, scaling, and colours.
Implementation Notes:
- The bulk of the driver adding logic is in editors/animation/drivers.c, where most of
the Driver UI operators and tools are defined
- The property eyedropper code is in interface_eyedropper.c along with all the other
eyedroppers (even though they don't share much actual code in common). However, this
turns out to be necessary, as we can't get access to many of the low-level buttons API's
otherwise.
Todo:
- It may be necessary to restore a way to access the old behaviour (i.e. "manual setup")
in case it is not practical to immediately pick a property.
- Other things to investigate here include extra hotkeys (e.g. Ctrl-Shift-D for Add Single?),
and to expose the N-N mode.
- Other things we could try include interactively applying scaling factors, picking
multiple targets (e.g. for location difference and rotation difference drivers),
and/or other ways of using these property picking methods.
To make it easier for animators working in a multipass pose-to-pose workflow
when inserting breakdown keyframes and so forth, it is now possible to specify
the "type" of keyframe being created (i.e. the colour of the keyframe, when drawn
in the Dope Sheet).
Usage:
1) Choose the type of keyframe ("Keyframe", "Breakdown", "Extreme", etc.) from
the new dropdown located between the AutoKeying and KeyingSet widgets on the
timeline header.
2) Insert keyframes
3) Rejoyce that your newly created keyframes have now been coloured for you already
in the DopeSheet.
Todo:
* Look into a way of using the actual keyframe colours (from the theme) for the icons
of these types.
This calls are not strictly speaking needed for the old dependency graph, but
due to more granular nature of upcoming depsgraph more actions requires update
of relations of IDs.
On the one hand this extra tags could be wrapped with if() statements, but on
the other hand it makes sense to keep tag in sync so it's clear if some issue
is caused by missing/extra tag or by depsgraph itself.
Make the UI API more consistent and reduce confusion with some naming.
mainly:
- API function calls
- enum values
some internal static functions have been left for now
This is only a (hacky) partial fix, actually, since `RNA_property_animated()` will still
not work in those cases... Better that than nothing, though.
Thanks to Campbell for review.
* 'Show Debug' now enabled for all newly created drivers. For most users, it is
useful to be able to see this to help figure out what's going on
* Removed failed experiment of creating new drivers with Generator FModifiers. I
had hoped that this would make it easier to create drivers that doubled or
halved the input values, but that has proved to not be the case, and instead
made harder for most users to set things up (as they'd have to remove these
first).
Now, when adding drivers from the UI, these get created with two keyframes (at
(0,0) and (1,1) for a 1-1 mapping), which can be easily tweaked normally.
However, for backwards compatability of scripts (notably rigify, and perhaps
some others out there), when creating drivers from scripts, they will still get
created with Generator FModifiers for now. We can review this situation again
for 2.7, but for now it seems ok.
