Wednesday, July 27, 2011

GSoC11 - Experimental curve drawing tweak

I've just committed a small tweak which makes the active F-Curve draw thicker than non-active ones in the Graph Editor.

Pros: 
- It's easier to see which one is active (i.e. the one you're editing), especially with the handle options that most people use.
- Thickness + opacity combined are much stronger than just opacity alone

Cons:
- Perhaps it's less visually accurate - harder to tell exactly where value lies with regard to the curve line. This is a major reason I've avoided doing this before, though I suspect that it's not likely to be that much of an issue in practice (i.e. people will zoom in several times before they need more precision)

Thoughts?

8 comments:

  1. I like it, and I think it´s very useful. In character animation, usually you don't need very accurate values, so I think this isn't a problem.

    And when you need very accurate values... well, you can introduce them numerically, or as you said, you can zoom in ;)

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  2. As far as I think it was my suggestion :)
    Besides I've suggested to draw active F-Curves more accurate. If you will zoom it in you can see that F-Curve contains of several "segments". I think perfomance will not suffer if quantity of "segments" will be increased. Look in Maya for example.

    And I suggest to make an option in the timeline "Playback Speed". Sometimes I need to see what will happen if I will playback animation with half of speed, or with double.
    Blender does not support it yet...

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  3. I reckon this is an improvement. Like Oliver, I dont care too much for accurate values (we can always type them in if so!)

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  4. +1! This is a VERY welcome addition. if I need specific values, I'll type them in, otherwise, this makes f-curves MUCH friendlier to those animation complex character rigs(IMO).

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  5. very nice man! this tweaks help a lot

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  6. Dear developer. I tried to use your build, and found many useful features, especially I liked range limits on F-Curve modificators.
    BUT... your build is very slow!
    I'm trying to animate Sintel Lite, and my work became slideshow. Another builds work fine, but without your great additions.

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