Don’t get your hopes up. It from William Reynish who got hired by Unity a few years ago. Since then the task has been mostly abandoned, AFAIK. It’s been that way for over three years now. I also had really high hopes for it. 
There’s no manager or programmer for the task, currently. And from what I understand it’s a really big thing to get right without trashing the performance and keeping it usable intuitively.
1 Like
Please do include a screenshot / mockup of what you think things should look like. Show what you mean!
In the upper image you can see how all x-curves are colored the same. It is impossible to distinguish the x location curve from the x rotation or x scale curve.
In the lower image you can see how i set it up by hand for each curve. It can be done but it is tedious and requires a prohibitve amount of time if you have to do it for tens or hundreds of objects.
I am no UI readability expert, so I am not sure if these colors are the best choice but at least it would be possible to differentiate between them.
8 Likes
thanks for idea. It actually never bothered me but I think it’s one of those cases that you cannot go back once it’s improved.
putting it to a user pref is a good idea, because I can foresee it being a bit controversial
Another option would be to change the line drawing style to dashed for e.g. rotations
3 Likes
Yes, I think that would be even better. Currently locked tracks are shown dotted, though, so there would have to be significant difference to locked tracks. Or locked tracks would have to be changed to something else. Grayed out is taken by muted channels.
Yes, a preference would probably be better. Or an overlay. That way you can quickly turn it on and off.
Edit:
Maybe something like this works. This uses a 1 px solid line as a base and then a second 2px dotted/dashed line on top of the solid line.
1 Like
Does it make sense that the Handle Type of the Keys is shown differently in the Time Line than in the Dope Sheet?
Does the shape of the Keys correctly represent the Handle Type?
Here I leave a proposal.
12 Likes
NLA does not allow Strips to cross other Strips, and sometimes detours are necessary.
It would be convenient to treat Strips as in video editors, where jumps, overlays and inserts are allowed.
I leave an example video capture made with Kdenlive. Considering that the program is Open Source and for another purpose, there is no problem.
5 Likes
Hi Folks,!
There’s a bias towards object actions in the dopesheet, curve editor and the UI in general (mostly):
- Objects get an extra level of nesting - Object → ObjectAction in the left side margin of the dopesheet/graph editor, while Material, Keyblock, etc. actions are not shown, instead we get the keys directly. Nesting is confusing enough as it is, perhaps we can just omit the unneeded ObjectAction Channel? what’s the rationale for it being shown just for objects?
- As far as I can tell you can only edit Object actions in the Action Editor? If it is possible for other actions (e.g. by selection in the outliner) it isn’t obvious how (Perhaps the entire action editor mode could be made redundant somehow)
- Some actions (e.g. Shader Nodetree actions) aren’t shown in the outliner at all.
- By nesting e.g. Material action channels under the object, they get shown twice in the editors if two objects are selected with the same linked material, (or if selection filtering is off)
Some possible solutions:
- Remove the Action Channel under the object in the graph editor and the dope sheet editor
- Provide a way to select or rename actions for any datablock - it could be a dropdown in the datablock channel, or in the outliner
- (I’m less sure of this) Make all datablock-level channels (e.g. material, shader nodetree,object data etc.) top level, removing excessive nesting? That way if you have selections with linked data, each channel is only shown once?
This guy has some great points.
4 Likes
The NLA thing, while I agree that’s annoying it’s a bit out of the scope of a papercut. The NLA editor is a whole other beast
But the key display, I agree with. It’s a bit odd that it doesn’t display the same
2 Likes
@ChristophLendenfeld Didn’t have the time to record a video for it, but what he shows at 16:25 looks like a great papercut: why if I deselected a keyframe the handles are still selected and editable?
2 Likes
makes sense, I’ll add it to the list. Potentially this needs design work though
2 Likes
I’ve been thinking about this for a while now. However I am not sure if that can be considered a papercut. For example the material keys are probably stored in an action, but I can’t see the action they are stored in, in the action editor.
There seem to be a few design questions like that that need to be answered first
1 Like
While I was looking at the patch for renaming modifiers, I thought about that also f-curves have the concept of “active” modifier (the circle to the left of the modifier’s name), and maybe it should be aligned to the UI of the objects’ modifiers (the blue outline).
Thinking about it I never really understood the active state of the modifiers’ f-curves: it doesn’t change if the modifier is enbled or not, it doesn’t show any new info anywhere… I guess that regardless if I’m missing some information (I’m not that fond with animating in Blender) and there is an actual use for it, maybe it could be considered to make them match in terms of appearance.
2 Likes
Same, never understood what was the point of it. It doesn’t seem to have any effect.
1 Like
I don’t think this issue is on your list yet. Would be great if it got some attention!
I’ll take a dig through the code to see if the active state is used anywhere, if not we could just remove it.
@jamez oof sorry that isn’t quite a papercut. As much as I’d love to fix it…
1 Like
That is a shame. There is a diff posted by Chris Clyne at the bottom of that page that claims to fix the issue. Maybe this is just a quick fix though and not a suitable solution?
This option is a good idea and if the option is in preference I think is better and maintain the option in the Graph Editor too. I’m an animator and use other software too and always I change the color of the rotations curves and scale to differentiate quickly each curve.
2 Likes
hi, @ChristophLendenfeld i have a proposal i you have time to read it carefully please Right-Click Select — Blender Community
thanks