Running patch list for current demo (win32-dec-2021)

[m-7761]

This is a list of fixes I've made since publishing https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-demo2c that aren't necessarily (yet) committed to the source code or rolled into the binary. As I integrate the changes I will put a line divider between the listed items.

• getBoundingRegion/getSelectedBoundingRegion hadn't used animated coordinates for points/joints.
• Neglected to finish drop-file functionality.
• Neglected to consider major version when comparing minor version!
• Consider MISFIT3D max version (1.7)
• Fix endSelectionDifference mix up between confusing enum types (e.g. SelectVertices vs. SelectionVertices!)
• Fix iterator range-check deleting final keyframe / frame after changing animation.
• Fix window title after Save As.
• Fix texture windows refresh glitch.
• Fix growing startup height caused by detaching menu/toolbar increasing client-size.
• Fix InterpolateCopy with no prior keyframe to copy from.
• Cleanup: Eliminate model-filter headers (78be69092331b940140cb1749ef82beb901902c3)
• Make joint/point Scale fields invariable (technically broken even though block size is ignored.)
• Remove redundant/nonstandard flags since MM3D2020 magic-number is less problematic.
• Neglected to read/write new keyframe interpolation modes for joints/points.
• Change/standardize time-table/time-frame read/write format.
• Texmgr.cc should use strrchr to search for extension separator.
• Can't defer change-notices where m_ignoreChange pattern (hack) in place.
• Use set_text for changing drop-down menu labels.
• Make addVertex allocate frame-anim frames.
• Major update for the model animations merge/split/copy/join operations (d684d5bd3ed5bda74d56a8f410a3b64d4aa0ec5b)
• Add novel position based merging frame animation to mergeAnimations.
• Fix MRU (most-recently-used) overflow.
• Fix removeFrameAnimFrame and setAnimFrameCount for removing frames.
• Insert frame on "paste" operation, and message for "copy" selection empty.
• Embarrassing brain malfunction: account for moveAnimation in vertex frame data!
• Had omitted "Paste Intermediate Values" case from Animation window menu.
• Fix undo for new interpolateSelected feature.
• Fix deletePoint and deleteAnimation.
• Fix changes to writeVprintf (DataSource) so OBJ export succeeds.
• Stop "infinite loop" in deleting animation within animation mode.
• Fix/streamline subdivide undo.
• Add make double-sided face (two faces) command to invnormalcmd.cc.
• Add "keep changes" prompt to close (X) buttons with new "canUndoCurrent" API.
• Draw joints in frame animation mode.
• Allow mergeModels inside animation mode (don't silently fail.)
• Remove ortho matrix Z offset (https://github.com/zturtleman/mm3d/issues/141)
• Add ShowJoints and ShowProjections change-bits so when these are force shown the UI is updated and do not override the show state inside drawJoints in ANIMMODE_FRAME mode.
• Remove assert in interpKeyframe for empty skeletal animation.
• Add preliminary support for snapping to "Z" dimension (MoveTool only ATM) so vertex-snap isn't restricted to the orthographic plane.
• Default scale to 1,1,1 instead of 0,0,0 in interpKeyframe.
• Make frames for setPositionRotation and setPositionScale in animation mode.
• Fix joint selection after switching from skeletal mode to no-animation mode (i.e. select against correct positions.)
• Enable UI elements in empty animation window after "New" function.
• New getAnimFrame returns 0 on out-of-bounds instead of -1.
• Fix drawJoints when line coincides with up-vector.
• Fix undo/redo problems around unselect family of APIs.
• Add feature to Influences menu to show certain bones as lines when they don't look right as octohedrons.
• Zoom to/from cursor ability (with mouse wheel).
• Remove nonsense "<Mixed>" item from bone weights menu.
• Keep UVs when merging models even if you don't want to pull in textures and materials.
• Add UV and multi-select support to Edge Turn function (what was MM3D thinking in ignoring UVs in these? will get to the rest in due course.)
• Use new connectivity data to implement Edge Turn algorithm (proof-of-concept) in linear time.
• Multiple critical fixes (183b79a82908e4ece69878efcc86186cd2f9debf) (287ba3ead857c3be167cf3d9c29586d65da4b934) including to copy/pasting keyframes.
• New ability to create a new root joint via right-click. (Not multiple roots, but I'm soon adding a feature to lock joints so their parents can be transformed without modifying the locked child joint.)
• Fix pasting point keyframes.
• Fix raise/lower animations in list.
• Many enhancements in recent commits (Sep. 7) too numerous to recount.
• Semi-experimental click to select vertices, joints, points.
• Add to polygon tool provisional mouse/modifier bindings for using existing vertices, changing selection, and restarting. Admittedly there's not a lot to work with with just the right button and shift key in addition to the left button. Selection uses shift+click.
• A lot more hotkey assignments.
• New fork name: Multimedia 3D.
• Fix bad logic truncating Dimensions display in sidebar.
• Treat <None> group as distinct entity and show blank group menu box when groups are mixed so assignment is possible.
• Fix freeze (infinite loop) introduced to getUnitWidth by earlier (Sep. 10) commit. (Zero-divide by uninitialized grid increment.)
• Add click to select to UV window.
• Fix crashing listbox regression in recent past revision.
• Fix ! typo in Transform Model (applyMatrix) affecting joints.
• Retain split frame in splitAnimation.
• Add Select All "command" kludge.
• Add "flags" to status bar to see checkbox style settings (e.g. Snap to Vertex.)
• Big (animation system) update: https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-demo2c
• New "Complex" animation type that's really just an animation that can do both skeleton and per-vertex style animation.
• Edit mesh and anything else in animation mode. This is similar to editing vertices on a skeleton in Complex mode.
• With Complex animations you can temporarily restrict it to skeletal or "frame" only editing mode with new commands.
• Add new Animation Mode on/off toggle that remembers the frame for the last selected animation.
• Add new trial Copy and Duplicate modes that copy the animated mesh.
• I've made OBJ export use the animation data. Maybe it was like this originally, I made the "manager" turn off animation since many loaders were doing this manually, but for static formats like OBJ it makes sense to keep it.
• I've put many "Geometry" functions into a Geometry->Edit menu. I'm considering breaking it off to a new Edit menu.
• Add full undo for joint deletion (https://github.com/zturtleman/mm3d/issues/153) via newly usable setBoneJointParent.
• Add "Parent" item to "Properties" panel (for reparenting bones/joints.)
• Many fixes and hotkey additions (please delete your key-config INI file to get the latest assignments) I don't want to recount :)
• Speaking of that I came up with a mnemonic to remember what numbers apply to the display modes: 1 for wire, 2 for 2D flat, 3 for 3D flat, and for texture add 2 for the UV map components (or 4 for 2D texture, 5 for 3D texture; W is 2D wire, and the rest are Shift modified.)
• I've added an axis to joints showed if selected. Also I was able to fix the axis display to be the same number of pixels. The joint axis is identical to the 0,0,0 axis.
• Joint axes don't really matter funnily enough, unless you want to do non-uniform scaling in your animation, then you might be able to get away with not caring, which is why the axes have never been visible I guess. It gave me an idea to add flexibility to the Rotate tool. My imagination kind of got away from me so I tabled it for now since I was ignoring other responsibilities.
• I've been looking at joints because the "Parent" feature I announced made it possible to put the child before the parent in the joint list, which would break many loops. So that's fixed, and now there can be multiple root joints.
• I found a lot of bugs around joints, so please update to that fix and many more.
• 1 more (almost forgot) I've stabilized the joint octohedrons in animation mode. That may sound strange, but the direction they face doesn't represent their axes. It's just so they look nice and even in the orthogonal views. But that looks odd when they're moving in animation because they tend to flip around quickly since they prefer not to be seen at a bad angle. But when the animation translates a joint it now breaks away from its octohedron, which can look like a glitch. I chose to leave it like this since it accurately represents the transformation in 100% weight case. The octohedrons aren't weighted and I'm not sure it would look nice if they weren't rigid or if they were drawn askew.
• 3/18/2021: Sorry, here's a fix for a bug where starting a new keyframe with rotate/move tools fed the previous frame to its subroutines.
• 3/18/2021: Also, changing the frame count from the animation list window had not resized the main window's time scrollbar.
• Fix crash on copying bones/joints owing to condition sense typo/mistake.
• Add "LMB Rotates View" preference/checkbox to choose which mouse button rotates to match what you're accustomed to.
• Fix more recent bug in summing multiple vertex weights because = was written instead of +.
• Remove old code that blocked root bone/joint deletions.
• Correctly handle cycles when reparenting bones/joints.
• Read file saved with out of order joints, i.e. children before parents.
• Remove influences cap, especially in sidebar when displaying multiple vertices.
• Turns out moving vertices with multiple influences (in animation mode) doesn't work. Bummer, but maybe there's still a way... in the meantime this emits a status bar error message.
• Edit animation mid playback.
• Influences rollout in sidebar to reduce "visual noise" post lifting the old cap. (Fix for UI glitch in previous patch.)
• More intuitive behavior when working with "influences" in sidebar.
• Preview build now built for Windows XP (untested.)
• 5/17/2021: Fix MU_SetObjectKeyframe::combine for redoing multiple joint/point animation transforms. (I introduced a typo at some point while simplifying code.)
• 12/8/2021: New additive blending mode with material based alpha and fix for the alpha blend render mode's crashing without the old multi-context (OpenGL) system.
• 2/24/2022: Lately I've been working with this software a lot and so making QOL improvements for myself, fixing a lot of bugs and bad design stuff around the UV editor, groups, and sidebar. I've been adding system menus to the UV editor to expand its functionality, and a option to quickly make a group+material combo (same name) to avoid extra steps. (I'm doing high churn work fixing PlayStation game models, mainly focused on assigning textures and adjusting their mappings in a factory line work type fashion.)
• I've also added a Shift Lock system (Tools menu) and Resume command bound to the Windows Menu key, to reopen the most-recent model, handy for debugging, although there's also a --resume command-line option to do this at start. Also I noticed the file-drop system wasn't working for multiple files. This was because they were being reopened into the same window, displacing the previous files, leaving only the last in the dropped list.
• Oh and, the groups/materials Clean up command is fixed (or improved) by removing the groups first so that the materials are free to be removed. Related/unrelated, Group selection is now improved, and the Group menu now adds selected faces to the existing selection (a new "Select" button does the old thing of selecting just the selected group.)
• The Home/End/PageUp/Down cluster of keys is now assigned to selecting view directions. On standard keyboards they form a 2x2 square that matches the quad viewport layout. Shift modifies them to chose the opposite directions.
• 2/26/2022: Fix unselect in UV editor, not sure how long this has been broken or how I didn't notice this until now. Also, add Ctrl+A and UV->face conversion to menu.
• 3/10/2022: I've recently fixed problems around pasting points and using Transform Model on frame animations with points. Source code isn't synced for the latter.
• 3/18/2022: In the past few days I've worked on fixing several sculpting tools that disregarded texture coordinates (making them next to useless) ... this is something I've wanted to do for a while now. A while back I added some abilities to the polygon creation tool choose existing vertices, however this didn't quite work because the selection order is important to this. I've tried to add an experimental system to keep track of vertex selection order to this end.
• 3/25/2022: Still fixing the simplify mesh function, changing sides strategy to average of face normals, and detect/avoid mirrored UVs that collapse. Added new versions of addVertex/addGroup that copy an existing vertex/group. This preserves animation information when duplicating/separating and makes the group UI as ergonomic as it can be. Fix unselecting vertices to unselect their faces. There's some radical hotkey changes, including using / combos for subdivide and other face functions. I'm putting destructive hotkeys on the right side of the keyboard. A few in the top-left require Ctrl, Drag-vertex is back on D. There's a new "Unhide" function that's really an invert function. Group/mesh select modes now have a back-face option. Pasting animation data will now use the selection to filter the clipboard.
• BTW, I experimented on the face input commands to offer more control, but decided for now to use the current view port (clicked)) to make the surface normal ensure faces are visible. This is new behavior because "commands" didn't previously have access to view port details. It's not obvious that's happening, so I liked the instructive options I set up, but since clockwise/counterclockwise input just doesn't make sense for the polygon tool I decided the menu options are premature.
• 4/1/2022: Big upgrade for the UV editor, including snapping, and new commands to be able to competently manipulate UVs, including a command analogous to "Flatten" called "Snap" instead because it fit better on small buttons beside "Flip" and "Turn". In fact I've changed the wording for the main editor window to match and have jostled hotkeys around so F5-F7 now snap on the axes, which is actually pretty critical for setting vertex positions with the sidebar properties, hence no modifiers like Alt. The shape creation tools now use Alt and the joint/point/projection tools can now use F8-F10, so being better in reach and getting a higher priority.
• 4/23/2022: I've developed a new category system called "Utilities" to support a new "UV Animation" system for basic (low-fi) game like effects. The Utilities window is opened with U (under Model menu) and the only kind of "utility" right now is this texture map animation system. Utilities are meant for more obscure use cases, to avoid UI clutter (also because remaining hotkeys are in short supply.)
• 6/6/2022: I've developed the beginnings of a graph based animation editor. There's more info in a post below. It includes a number of decent enhancements unrelated to this, including optimizations for undo/redo and accessory window and hotkey enhancements. There's also an animation "clean up" command located in the Model menu and also in the Animation Sets window. The latter lets it be applied more selectively.
• 8/31/2022: Found/fixed a new problem with undo sequencing. Pretty serious. See comment.
• 9/2/2022: Restored usability of texture editor from broken state since June update.
• 9/9/2022: New Layers/Overlay feature. See comment for notes.
• 10/4/2022: Extensive fix for Alpha Blend mode's BSP (bsptree.cc) logic as it wasn't really working in any capacity.
• 6/27/2023: Fix for Delete joints. Add "Reorder" window. Let Windows Explorer open into existing app instance via FindWindow and WM_DROPFILES.
• 3/17/2024: Added Translate and Scale tools to the animation graph editor. Fixed some things too.

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Note: I'm updating the Windows pre-release demo more frequently than the source code depending on severity.

[m-7761]

[m-7761]

https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/commit/d684d5bd3ed5bda74d56a8f410a3b64d4aa0ec5b is the first substantial update I'm made since publishing the latest demo. It's mostly concerned with the animation merge/join/split/copy operations. I guess I left these on the cutting room floor before. I've lately been relying on some of them. And I have added an algorithm for merging frame animation data that does so on the basis of comparing the positions of the base model's vertices.

This technique lets me do some work with Blender and then merge that with the animation data from MM3D. Blender still has way better UV map tools.

EDITED: 928cf578391e4e973208af9deb2e22765503b714 is a follow-up patch within 2hrs. It deals with a mindless thing I did back when I was changing how vertex frame data is stored. (My brain was just working in zombie mode, it thought the newest animation would always be last in the list. I don't know if that's too much thinking or too little. It's a reminder how unreliable brains are.)

EDITED: 75d7575e123b36e5468a6a55de69385f14c71c19 third time's the charm! This addresses a change I made earlier today to how frame vertex data indices are adjusted. (Adding data onto the back looks identical to inserting onto the front of the next, so it requires an extra parameter to resolve this ambiguity.) Note these three commits are part of a series uploaded today that represents a major addition to the original demo code. The other changes up to this point tend to be small corrections.

[m-7761]

In the past few days I've uploaded new code with a click-based selection system I've been sitting on for sometime. The click system goes through the snapping path, for better or worse. I developed it while I was trying to make the polygon tool more productive and user-friendly, and realized the selection tools should be able to click to select too. Snapping in perspective mode now uses the perspective correct projection.

I've spent two significant days with MM3D. The recent uploads have a lot more code than usual, and some of it was old code I've not felt comfortably uploading. I think they're a substantial contribution. It's taken me longer than I expected to work out all of the kinks. Fortunately I've been using MM3D to do my work, which has granted me ample opportunity to ferret out lingering bugs in my rewrite.

I spent a significant amount of time with glPolygonOffset attempting to eliminate z-fighting around the grid display. Also I improved the depth-buffer precision in the orthographic views by factoring in the zoom component. And something that may've gone unnoticed is a while back I made the zoom relative to the mouse cursor, I think this is expected of modern day software.

[m-7761]

I've published a substantial update (https://github.com/mick-p1982/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-demo2c) to the animation system. This supersedes earlier demonstrations. Please see the notes.

P.S. Something I've no concrete plans for but I think would be a nice addition is a "Composite" type animation, that would round out the available modes. It would be a virtual animation that's really a combination of "real" animations, so that you can do things that would be otherwise impractical. I'm also thinking of adding a nonlinear interpolation facility. That's like adding some acceleration/deceleration between keyframes.

[m-7761]

EDITED: I found a lot of bugs, most not related to the new update, but a lot nonetheless that have been dealt with by new uploads. I started a new round of work after realizing a change I made to let joint parentage be reassigned opened up a door for bugs because many loops assumed the parents would be lower in the list than their children.

[m-7761]

3/18/2021: I haven't updated this in a while. Today I've uploaded two important bug fixes for animation editing. (Edited: see list in OP.) I also see a new Separate command is added (think cut/paste) and I think now copying with no selection copies the entire model, and there's some new commands (not as complete as I'd like) for copy/pasting animation poses. There's also a new Faces area in the sidebar that can reorder faces. I'm probably forgetting other minor enhancements here. I want to add a generic system for controlling the order of elements since that's often significant to 3D run-time software. Sorry for the informal update.

[m-7761]

2/24/2022: FWIW I'm doing daily work with this software ATM and so am finding myself stopping to make improvements to its code here and there. I expect this to continue for a while, as I'd like to get it more polished up all around to prepare for making way for some major enhancements. One area I'm particularly interested in is nonlinear animation and keyframe analysis to convert fixed sampled animations into sparse keyframe animations.

[m-7761]

3/18/2022: I've just finished some interesting code to make a number of tools/commands respect the texture map. For whatever reason the original MM3D author only took these far enough to do faces irrespective of other factors.

The Simplify mesh tool is somewhat improved to get cases that it used to fail. What was needed is to treat each side of the axial line that it merges the faces around as separate from the other side, so that they don't disqualify each other. It also now comes in two modes, the first doesn't simplify where the texture map or "group" mapping would be disturbed.

I'll probably take another pass at the Drag Vertex on Edge tool at some point. What I ended up with only moves the texture coords on the active line. It offers a tolerance setting (called Proximity) that will drag other along that same line if they're connected to the source coords. I think this is interesting, but it would benefit from a more complete, fully projective solution. I will probably offer both as options since there are tradeoffs. I figure I'll work on this when I find the existing option inadequate in the course of my own work.

(Oh, hey, I also made the drag tool to drag multiple vertices/faces, this is more like a "translation" solution. I also remember the reason I didn't take this to the next level is I felt that the undo system needs to be overhauled to work with pointers, because it's too difficult to find the face index given a vertex index. I have a way to get the pointer, but not the index, without scouring the whole list of faces. I will do that some day.)

Anyway, I believe this is a significant enhancement, worthy of writing something special about. I hope someone can find this useful. I really enjoy working on MM3D this way.

[m-7761]

4/1/2022: I'm making a special note of a new patch with lots of UV editing enhancements (including snapping) bringing it closer to being practical for serious work. I'm planning to add a new "center point" tool system before long, like Blender's 3D cursor more or less, to control pivoting. I think this will make it a streamlined experience. Currently a global pivot is used, which can be like taking 2 steps forward and 1 step back in many scenarios. (Edited: There's a note with more info in the OP.)

[m-7761]

4/23/2022: Lately I've been doing a ridiculous amount of work just to add a feature to animate the entire UV map. To do this I chose to add a new concept called "Utilities" filed under Model->Utilities. U is the default hotkey. It's modeled on the Meta Data system, which I've renamed User Data so it can neatly use the Ctrl+U hotkey with a mnemonic flair.

Instead of setting a value, a Utility has a type menu, and that translates into a side panel that swings out with settings for that type. This includes a Detach button that allows for editing with simultaneous access to the main window. Detaching sacrifices the Cancel button for having to use Ctrl+Z manually for every change.

The UV Animation system includes the same feature set as joints and points. Utilities are associated with other objects, in this case with groups. Once a model has one of these animations a checkbox appears in the Animation rollout to toggle the animation on and off. It only plays when animations are playing. It's decoupled from the time of the current animation by adding an m_elapsedTime parameter to the animation system to track looping playback length. The FPS values are used to translate between the two animations.

[m-7761]

6/6/2022: I've been working on a GraphicWidget for the animation window. It took me too long to develop it, so the feature set is very spare. There's also several unrelated improvements, including optimizations for undo/redo which were previously pretty memory hungry (and maybe slow on debug builds) in some pathological cases. Other enhancements are resizable accessory windows and I'm finally happy with the hotkeys and menu labels. The File menu is no longer using Ctrl+Alt combos, and uses things like Alt+Up instead, to be a little more practical to input. The About window now has working hyperlinks and a Tip to reset the keycfg.ini file to enable new hotkeys.

The main attraction is a graph editor and an animation Clean Up window. The graph plots animation curves, and can drag (Move/Scale) frames to adjust timing. It has very limited ability to select/input key frame data.

My goal was to set up a nonlinear animation system, but I had to settle for just the bare minimum basics for now. There had to be a minimum feature set in order to publish something not completely incomplete, and I have to move onto other work. There's a main menu in the animator window. Oh! And tools are synchronized with the main window and hotkeys inherit from the main window's menu. Synchronization makes it so you don't have to think about which window is the foreground window.

[m-7761]

FWIW I've uploaded a test model with animations, to the Release page, and have fixed some problems in the other day's patch, mainly pixels were off on the scroll bar.

[m-7761]

Sorry for late source code (if anyone is reading this) but I've had to switch to a new PC and TortoiseGit+Github is a waking nightmare (why can't things ever "just work"?) and I just found out it wasn't actually pushing the Commit command, and when I tried to it just hung waiting. (So, what eventually worked is to use the command line (git push) which sounds simple, but I never use git from command-line. Then it gave a sane prompt for Github's "personal access token" ... so I don't know why TortoiseGit's author hasn't had complaints to fix this.) (Edit: https://gitlab.com/tortoisegit/tortoisegit/-/issues/3933)

[m-7761]

There was a pretty serious bug with deleting triangles, but also anything, I hadn't thought of with resuming/combining undo ops. It had let a compound delete/add operations get in front of other operations that depend on those being in order. I'm surprised I didn't see it sooner. 80b57ad4e1f8bb18caffce2863db8892a4e8cde3

[m-7761]

In the last update in June I seem to have broken the texture map editor's usability. It's now restored.

[m-7761]

I've had to add a layers feature for my work. It gives you 4 layers to work with, or 5 including the layer where things go when you hide them. Its main focus is to be able to put overlapping models in one MM3D file and still be able to work with them without them getting in each other's way.

The full package includes 2 new groups in the View->Reconfigure menu for changing layers and toggling overlays and buttons on each view port that can let each view show a different layer. And lastly a new item in the Geometry->Hide menu that moves things into the current view's selected layer.

By default layers only show one at a time. So they're not actually layered. But you can turn each one into an "overlay" that means it will be shown even when not selected (in all views) but cannot be interacted with. You can use that like a "reference" model. And there's an Snap to Overlay mode to choose if you want to be able to snap to the reference. You can interact with them if you select the reference in another view or switch layers. The only things that care about layers is where the "m_visible" state was checked, which used to just mean hidden-or-not.

All of this required a pretty big overhaul under the hood since having views showing different content really runs against the existing design. Anyway, usually you'll change to a layer and create things on that layer, and that's that. ff744106ed3ac44c66099baddda93fe326698d2b

[m-7761]

I've fixed a problem with Deleting joints and have added a "Reorder" window to the Help menu for changing the order of data in the MM3D file.

Also opening files from Windows Explorer should reuse any existing instance of MM3D. I think this will work with opening multiple files too, which I believe Explorer opens into multiple instances without some really complicated registry hacking that I could never get to work.

[m-7761]

For a while the Windows EXE (ZIP) file was missing from Releases. I've fixed it now.

[m-7761]

Woops! I've added the Misfit Model 3D docs to the mm3d-portable.zip release.

https://github.com/m-7761/mm3d/releases/tag/win32-dec-2021

[m-7761]

I've patched in 7mos worth of fixes. The main problem is crashing when opening a nonmodal window from another nonmodal window, such as the animation or texture windows, because the "creator" window status would be assigned to the parent window instead of the main window.

[m-7761]

FYI: I've fixed a serious bug: I've uploaded a fix for problems around creating New animations in the animations sets window.