Friday, July 8, 2016

Boom! New Animation Features - 7 July 2016

Boom! I've just pushed a bunch of features I've been working on to master. Some of these are things that you've been asking for for a long time too, so be sure to keep an eye out on the nightly builds coming out soon :)

Here's a quick list of the recent highlights:
* Animation Editors: Object datablocks are now sorted alphabetically by default  - I suddenly figured out a way to minimise the potential performance hit of having this enabled, so now you don't have to suffer with having you objects ordered however the old depsgraph thought they should be ordered (yes, that's the reason why the old ordering was as crazy as it was... blame the old depsy!)

* Dopesheet: Added "Moving Hold" as a keyframe type - Note that this will also automatically show "long keyframe" indicators between these keyframes (as you get with normal holds), so you can see at a glance where these are

* Dopesheet: Keyframe size can be adjusted as part of theme settings - For those who've been saying that by default the keyframes are bit hard to select

* Delta Transforms
   1) Added operators to make it easier to "Freeze" the current transform (either Loc/Rot/Scale together, or just Loc, Rot, or Scale by itself) into the Delta Transforms, leaving the normal transforms zeroed out again. These can be found in the Apply (Ctrl-A) menu
   2) The "Animated Transforms to Deltas" tool is now located in the Apply menu too, to make it easier to find it relative to the new tools


And from a few weeks back (for good measure):
* Ctrl-Shift-C: Made it easier to add constraints between bones in different armatures  - When the second object selected is an armature in pose mode with an active bone, the Ctrl-Shift-C operator for adding constraints will be able to pick the bone in the second armature as the target. Previously, it would only go as far as using the object

* FCurve Auto Colours: "XYZ to RGB" works for Quaternions too now  - The "W" channel uses a Yellow colour (blended from the X and Y axis colours).  (Note: If I knew what I know now, we would have had some stuff in place to ensure that colour animation was done in any colour space other than sRGB - even HSV as used here would be a lot better for a lot of people)

* Dopesheet: Circle and Lasso select now work  - These were relatively new additions to the Graph Editor (like only added in the past 1-2 years, from Gooseberry or so), so that's why they weren't there for the dopesheet yet

* GPencil: Eraser respects "Selection Mask" when in EditMode


I've got a bunch of other stuff planned, but for now, I'm not sure when I'll have time to get around to them yet. Hopefully soon (fingers crossed) :)

Happy animating!

7 comments:

  1. Thanks! Especially for the multiple armature-bones select.

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  2. thanks for the upgrade ^^.
    it could be possible to add to the to do list an option to reset or not deltas when using Alt+ g or s or R ??
    it would be really handy especially for hooks that adds empties in X,x,x coordinates and there is no easy way to place them on the original position when are moved. Transfering the position to deltas and having the reset shortcut modifying only the base transformation instead of everything would be really useful.
    Adding keyframes to deltas kinda works but with each transform reset its required to change keyframes to update.

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    Replies
    1. could it be . . . ( sorry for my grammar)

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    2. Good idea! I'm not sure I entirely understand the workflow you're talking about, but it shouldn't be too much extra work to add functionality like this :)

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    3. Awesome i just see the commit, once buildbot get a new win build ill do a video about it, thnaks

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    4. here is more or less the idea behind the workflow, is i metion in the video its not the best to work with actions becasuse it creates an action for object or empty instead of one for a group of objets like an armature, but its great to do quick things =^ ~^=
      https://youtu.be/OAYpfssmIVM

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