Hello all, long time no post!
As we’re getting closer and closer to releasing our files, I’m noticing that we have a huge (and I mean huge) trove of Python code that is largely undocumented. Some of it is pretty specific to this project, And other bits are useful in general. Even the specific stuff could be adapted, so it’s worth going over.
To address this we’ve thought of doing an ‘Addons for Empathy’ video series, quickly explaining what some of the addons do, in addition to more traditional docs. The first I’ll do in this way is the Floating Sliders Addon: In short, this pops up small, keyframable Open GL sliders for any Floating point Pose-bone properties. The code is on gitorious, and following is a simple video explanation of what it does and how to use it:
As always, the video is licensed CC-BY, while the addon itself is GPL.
You can also download this video as a high resolution .webm or .mp4 file, or watch it on youtube
The screencast itself was edited in Pitivi, with Inkscape titles. Video was captured via the Gnome screencast feature, and audio with Audacity
Big thanks to Campbell Barton for help getting min/max of custom properties, and explaining some of the finer points of keymaps, and to Dalai Felinto for showing a possible hack to make a popup menu (I ended up using a slightly different way)
Very intuitive and helpful, Bassam!
I can’t practically use it for my current needs now but I’m sure it will be in the near future.
Thanks for sharing. Invaluable.
– Reyn
Thanks Reyn! It’s improving steadily (currently I’m bugfixing until it is ‘stable’ and working with no new features) and I’ll probably then go back to adding some small features and extensions/options to make it more useful.
It’s mainly useful for animators and riggers, probably not so much for still images/environments.
Thanks very much for sharing. Rigging and animation of characters is something I have not done yet, but this little add-on makes me want to set up some creatures of my own and use it.
Much appreciated!
You have a noisy keyboard 😉
Amazing to see how you are capable of pushing Blender’s boundaries ! Thx so much for sharing !
Hi, the Video looks awesome…
but I can t download a .py file from gitorious..
the downloaded filse is named
floating-slider-blender-addon-floating-slider-blender-addon-cef5860397b006c913e3f3f4512be3177704ceae.tar.gz
..
I try rename the file to (floating sliders.py ) and I try to installed over the preferences add on menü but a message comes up ,
do not have UTF 8 encoding…
Means that no Sliders for Blender 2.71 and inder Windows…
any info would be nice to know ?
wfg Sebbo
the file is compressed! but you can still open it, try a compression / decompression program and it should extract a py file (hint google for extract tar gz in windows)
[…] of custom tools built for the Tube project in his ‘Add-ons for Empathy’ series (Floating Sliders, Proxies and a Bonus). We’ve hesitated to release our tools until the film is done, when […]
Nice features,Bassam. I have just one big problem.I installed the floating_sliders.py, in the rar file there was also another file (pax_global_header) I don’t know where to put this one.May you explain me better what to do with it? Another iussue. I don’t see the sliders in the toolshelf as you have them in the video, how do I set up that?
Hi
Addon looks interesting, just Can’ t download in from Gitorius, it says “Gitorious.org is migrating all the repositories to Internet Archive.
The repositories will soon be available for read-only access, with original clone URLs preserved. ” Could you share it somewhere else? Thank you.
regards Markus
arg yeah, so gitorious shut down.
I’ll have to dig it up! At this point I think that that code is a dead end, I’m more interested in the wiggly widgets branch of blender, which will allow custom widget api. At that point, expect an explosion of stuff like this.
The reason I’m not a fan of the old code is updates: as it is not a blender widget, it has to manually update-tag and scene update for live updating. This can be either slow, or incremental depending on the scene.
Stay tuned, I’ll try to find the code. It’s on an HD somewhere…
[…] is at gitorious This brings us to the bonus round- the Rig Selection UI. I’m continuing my round of experimentation with BGL and modal addons, to make the kind of ‘typical’ rig ui where animators can […]
[…] Floating Sliders […]