All my changes from the last week

[sybrenstuvel]

Hey Jasper,

These are all my changes from last week, which resulted in the version we use in the Blender Animation Studio right now.

My suggestion would be to bump the version number to 1.0 once this PR has been merged. After all, it's used in a production environment, so there is IMO no reason not to call it 1.0.

The main changes

• Made the mixing of the selected pose visible in the UI. Rather than moving the mouse between two invisible and rather arbitrary limits (the point that was clicked, and 100 pixels to its right) we now use the regular Blender UI to show a mix slider. This also allows the artist to use the shift key to increase precision. I also added explicit 'Apply' and 'Cancel' buttons.
• Added flipping of poses, so that a pose library only has to be made for one side of the body.
• Show creation options when pose library is local, but the rig & character are not. Fixes #34.
• Introduced the concept of "character name", which is derived from the rig name. I also added a select box that only shows the pose libraries for the currently selected character, so that the animators don't have to scroll through all the actions in the current file (Blenrig also uses a lot of actions, so this is a real problem for us in practice).
• Removed the suffix indicating whether there is a thumbnail or not. This feature encoded metadata in the pose name, which is very fragile and error-prone. As a result of this feature, we had to rename all our poses to get rid of the suffix. Furthermore, IMO the end result is backward -- poses that need attention (that is, are missing a thumbnail) should be highlighted, whereas this feature highlighted poses that did not require any attention any more.
• Interpolation of poses is actually performed correctly. This fixes #38.

Other code improvements

• Removed logging configuration from the add-on, as this should be left to the user. Fixes #36.
• Adhering to PEP 8, PEP 257, and Blender standards w.r.t. operator/panel names and bl_description not ending in a period.
• Showing choices as checkboxes, rather than toggle buttons.
• Greatly simplified image loading code.
• Split the add-on into more Python files, so that development requires a bit less scrolling up and down.
• Simplified other code.
• Fix #37

[jasperges]

Hi Sybren,

Thanks for all the work and the pull request.

Made the mixing of the selected pose visible in the UI. Rather than moving the mouse between two invisible and rather arbitrary limits (the point that was clicked, and 100 pixels to its right) we now use the regular Blender UI to show a mix slider. This also allows the artist to use the shift key to increase precision. I also added explicit 'Apply' and 'Cancel' buttons.

Personally I don't really like this new approach. I do agree that moving 'between two invisible and rather arbitrary limits' is also not the best solution, but it was a very fast work flow. Now you have to shift + click then go to the appropriate panel where some new settings have 'magically' appeared, drag the slider and press 'apply'. That's too much work in my opinion. My ideal would be that you can immediately start mixing poses (like in my 'old' version) but also have feedback on the mix factor and could use shift and probably also ctrl for the precision and press escape to cancel the operation. And of course provide a sane default setting for the drag limits (also taking into account HDPI displays).

Showing choices as checkboxes, rather than toggle buttons.

I deliberately made them as toggle buttons, because I think it looks a bit cleaner in the UI.

One thing you probably overlooked is the 3D View Panel. That wasn't updated, it doesn't show the mix slider and also still has toggle buttons (which is a good thing ;) ).

All this being said I will still merge it. There were some great improvements and to be honest I don't use the add on myself and I also don't have time to work on it at the moment. If you could also fix the 3D View Panel, that would be awesome. If you can't I will see if I can do it myself.

[sybrenstuvel]

Personally I don't really like this new approach. […] I deliberately made them as toggle buttons, because I think it looks a bit cleaner in the UI.

Of course with a personal add-on you're absolutely free to do whatever you want. However, I'm a bit more bound to adhering to the Blender UI design. I also try to not invent any new UI interaction paradigms specifically for a single add-on if I can avoid it.

Our animators are happy with the more visible, slider-based design, so I'm happy too ;-)

If you could also fix the 3D View Panel, that would be awesome.

I might, but right now there are other, more pressing issues to solve at the BI ;-)

Thanks for accepting & merging the PR as-is!