Hello, I was delighted to discover the existence of the calc_length() function in Blender 2.8 today. I like to think it was added because of my rightclickselect post: https://blender.community/c/rightclickselect/4ncbbc/
However, upon playing around with it, I found that it operates on the bezier curve points of the spline before deformations are applied. I’d like to see this expanded to have these options, for the sake of using with rigs:
“INITIAL” which calculates from the undeformed data, as it does now,
“DEFORMED” which calculates from the data points of the curve after deforming modifiers (only those that affect curve spline points)
“FINAL” which calculates the length of the derived mesh of the curve after all modifiers have been applied. Of course, this would only work on wire meshes.
I don’t even really need the “FINAL” option, but I think someone else will.
This is important to me because I sometimes like to use deformers along curves to set the location of bones, and I need to calculate the difference in the length of the curve after deformations to keep the position of bones consistent.
Thanks for reading my post!