GSoC11 - Animation Channel Filtering Goodies 1

Refactoring nearly always make it possible for some additional features to get added quickly and easily, some of which might not have been possible in the past, and/or some which we hadn't thought of yet.

As a result of recent refactoring efforts on the animation channel filtering system, the backbone of the animation editors, which takes care of all the issues regarding what animation data exists in the scene, and of that data what do we want to see and to be able to edit, a number of features have now become possible.

Material and Texture Nodes Support

Support for showing this animation data has been lacking for a while. A major problem was that doing so would have required a bit too much effort for ensuring that the changes were added correctly in a few places.

The refactor cleaned up this stuff, making it easier to add new channel-types for data with a much more consistent framework and less work. While the original code was fine at the time, as more stuff was added over time, the situation eventually became untenable.

From the screenshots, you can see that the texture nodetrees are perhaps nested a bit too deeply to be conveniently used. As with other things that need to deal with texture data, we have a problem in that textures can be "free floating" these days, especially with use in modifiers and brushes, so having textures nested under materials or the data that is using them may turn out to be not so good in the long run.

I'm still thinking over what to do there, but any suggestions regarding this are welcome :)