- highlighed buttons that were never pressed could be activated by accident when canceling search popup.
- canceling a search popup on a popup would close both.
Color Pickers in Blender support precision editing with holding Shift key.
Unfortunately, on first click the picker cursor moves to the mouse position,
making the precision dragging quite useless.
Now, if you hold Shift, the picker editing will only apply the delta motion
of your mouse drags, making it much nicer for fine tuning of color grades
in Sequencer or Compositor.
To achieve this, some code (callbacks and search button creation) was moved from wm_operators.c to interface/interface.c, and a new UI function was added, uiDefSearchButO_ptr.
Note: This new code uses the fact that uiButHandleFunc callbacks get executed before operator when one of its arg is the button itself!
Many thanks to Campbell who helped me a lot with this patch!
Cleanup: also removed two unused pointers from uiBut struct.
* Fix precision overflow issue with overlay previews,
* Expose alpha mask mapping to UI (still not functional but coming soon).
* More overlay refactoring:
Overlay now does minimal checking for texture refresh.
Instead, we now have invalidation flags to set an aspect of the brush
overlay as invalid. This is necessary because this way we will be able to
separate and preview different brush attributes on the overlays, using
different textures:
These attributes/aspects are:
Primary texture (main texture for sculpt, vertex, imapaint)
Secondary texture (mask/alpha texture for imapaint)
Cursor texture (cursor texture. It involves brush strength and curves)
Modified the relevant RNA property update functions and C update callback
functions to call the relevant cursor invalidation functions instead
of checking every frame for multiple properties.
Properties that affect this are:
Image changes, if image is used by current brush,
Texture slot changes, similarly
Curve changes,
Object mode change invalidates the cursor
Paint tool change invalidates the cursor.
These changes give slightly more invalidation cases than simply
comparing the relevant properties each frame, but these do not occur in
performance critical moments and it's a much more elegant system than
adding more variables to check per frame each time we add something on
the system.
- Theme color for the brush popup was not correctly coded. Now it follows menu item
style correctly, which also allows all the themes we have to give readable text.
- RMB cancel also added for slider buttons and the color picker.
In text editor, the CTRL+F find now opens property region (or keeps it) and
activates the search button for input.
That's already nice! But next step should be to do a search on exit of
the button (or while typing). That's stuff I need Campbell to help with though.
Notes:
- Probably Py api for property buttons could get an "operator=" arg?
- The warning menu "not found" should go away
- I also suggest to make "wrap" search default for new editors
PyNodes opens up the node system in Blender to scripters and adds a number of UI-level improvements.
=== Dynamic node type registration ===
Node types can now be added at runtime, using the RNA registration mechanism from python. This enables addons such as render engines to create a complete user interface with nodes.
Examples of how such nodes can be defined can be found in my personal wiki docs atm [1] and as a script template in release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py [2].
=== Node group improvements ===
Each node editor now has a tree history of edited node groups, which allows opening and editing nested node groups. The node editor also supports pinning now, so that different spaces can be used to edit different node groups simultaneously. For more ramblings and rationale see (really old) blog post on code.blender.org [3].
The interface of node groups has been overhauled. Sockets of a node group are no longer displayed in columns on either side, but instead special input/output nodes are used to mirror group sockets inside a node tree. This solves the problem of long node lines in groups and allows more adaptable node layout. Internal sockets can be exposed from a group by either connecting to the extension sockets in input/output nodes (shown as empty circle) or by adding sockets from the node property bar in the "Interface" panel. Further details such as the socket name can also be changed there.
[1] http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/User:Phonybone/Python_Nodes
[2] http://projects.blender.org/scm/viewvc.php/trunk/blender/release/scripts/templates_py/custom_nodes.py?view=markup&root=bf-blender
[3] http://code.blender.org/index.php/2012/01/improving-node-group-interface-editing/
Curves widget error: after deleting a point, and click to add a new point, on dragging
it the point flipped up 20 pixels. Was caused by changed layout and region view matrix.
Solved by storing actual mousecoords instead of mapped ones.
Alt+Mouse Wheel events depended on the button under the mouse being active, else it would change the current frame.
Button re-activation wasn't 100% reliable since it depends on fake mousemove events.
Now keep button active when its executed if the mouse stays over it.
Dragging on toggle buttons can now be used to press multiple buttons at once, especially useful for layer and outliner buttons.
notes:
- automatically enabled for all toggle buttons
(may change this if it becomes a problem).
- only buttons of the same type are pressed
(helps avoid annoyances eg; dragging past layer buttons onto other 3d header buttons and pressing by accident).
- automatic axis locking - dragging will lock to X/Y depending on the initial drag direction,
makes swipe motions work better, especially with the outliner.
implementation details:
- may re-implement as a region handler (currently its a modal operator).
- checking buttons in-between cursor motion events could be more efficient (but currently works ok).
- button execution needs to be improved
(currently executing a button thats not under the mouse needed a workaround for passing uiHandleButtonData),
requires further changes to UI code, will do next.
As per discussion and analysis of all trackpad usage, we now
follow this convention:
- Blender follows system setting for trackpad direction preference.
- If you set your system to "natural" scroll, we need to invert a couple
of cases in Blender we do "natural" already. Like:
- view rotate (the inversed option just never feels ok)
- scroll active items in list or pulldown menu (up/down is absolute)
- ALT+scroll values in buttons (up/down is absolute)
The new User Preference setting "Trackpad Natural" handles this.
For 2.66 we only have trackpad handling for OS X... so this isn't
affecting trackpad usage in Windows and Linux, which stick to be mapped
to Scroll Wheel still.
(Note: viewrotate now is "natural" always, changing how it worked in the
past weeks).
