How would integration work? The return...

[Dodgy]

Okay, I posted this on the old forum, and someone thought we should have another round, to see how we could actually work integration theoretically.

I imagined integration as one package, with the ability to set up Environments. These would include the settings
1) for panels (layout, which ones are active etc),
2)the window layout (do you have 4 (X/Y/Z/persp) or 1),
3) the hotkeys assignments
4) the menu layout
5) which types of objects can be selected (objects/polys/points/bones/lights etc)

When LW switches between Environments, it would remember the current State so you could switch between different Environments to what you were doing quickly and easily. The State of the Environment would consist of:
1)the centres/zooms/orientations of the different viewports,
2)the channels selected in the Graph editor,
3)the visibility of objects/polys/other items (so you could hide bits in Modeler and have them visible in the Layout environment)
4)any object/poly/light etc selection

This is just off the top of my head, feel free to suggest changes, more bits or whatever :)

[DaveW]

We should be able to open different environments on different monitors, so I can have a modeling environment on one monitor and animation on the other; and these should be in different windows, unlike XSI wich must stretch the main app's window across all the monitors. The ability for modeler to track layout's time and show any deformations so we can model corrective morph targets. No skelegons, bones would be available in Modeler along with motion options so you can do your rigging in one place. Modeler should have the abilit to display layout viewports such as schematic, light view, and camera view. The seperate scene and object files should stay, but a third format should be implemented. The third format would contain all objects, textures, and scene info. It would be like an archive, but LW would be able to read it natively. I think using the zip format would be a good idea, then we could add, remove, or replace the objects/textures/scenes manually if we need to. This type of format would be really nice for backing up work, sharing work, and for people who don't like having to remember savng objects and scenes when working in Layout.

[Dodgy]

Originally posted by DaveW
[B]We should be able to open different environments on different monitors, so I can have a modeling environment on one monitor and animation on the other; and these should be in different windows, unlike XSI wich must stretch the main app's window across all the monitors.


Sounds good :)

No skelegons, bones would be available in Modeler along with motion options so you can do your rigging in one place.

That's what I meant about environments deciding which items are selectable. If we could make custom environments, you could have Bones and Polys/points selectable in an Skinning environment for example.
A Surface environment would have a Perspective view, a UV map view and a Surface editor panel. It would only allow you to select polys.

Modeler should have the abilit to display layout viewports such as schematic, light view, and camera view.


You should be able to have any number of viewports in a window, which could display any of the panels as well as the normal viewport views, maybe being able to lock a pane to a particular panel, with free panels which would fill with whatever the last panel chosen is.

[Dodgy]

Also, object attributes would be in the environment, like

Objects: x,y,z,h,p,b
Bones:h,p,b

Would mean it would remember the States of these channels from environment to environment.

So this means the actual values of any channels would be in the State, so it would remember bones which have been bent, etc (for rigging...)