As eluded to in the last post, here is a quick sneak peek of the GUI I'm working on for the new Lua based animation system. It's been created in Qt using the new QtCreator IDE, which I have to say is a very nice system for building cross platform GUI applications.
Key elements are...
- Multi-window design using Qt's docking facilities. The Avar table, OpenGL preview and time control can all be undocked and moved to change layout.
- Custom spreadsheet view for the avars. The cells can be clicked on and dragged to change the value, and the OpenGL view updates live to show changes to the keyframes, making setting up animations very easy.
- Everything is still in Lua, the scene and all relevant data is stored in the Lua state and is read by the GUI, meaning the framework still remains distinct from the GUI.
- Custom syntax highlighting using a combination of plain Lua syntax and extensions for The Animator elements.
- Lua command line below the main editor. Using this you can run any Lua command and modify the scene live, the GUI will update accordingly. For example, run Model("balloon") and a new model will be created and show up in the tree view called "balloon".
- Time slider to play animation. Drag the time slider at the bottom and the OpenGL view updates, along with the green current frame marker in the avar table.
I'll be posting a screencast at the weekend to show it in operation. As always, anyone interested in this should feel free to contact me to ask questions, or post here on the blog.
Cheers
Paul
2 comments:
Great Job!
I'm really interesssed by this framework!
if i can get a try ,my mail is dedeks3000@gmail.com.
PS:Do you plan to create another Menv environment?
dedeks3000: I will be making the source available on the Aqsis Git repository soon.
I plan to create a procedural animation system, based on the research by Steven May in his PhD thesis. I believe there are similarities between his tool (AL) and menv, but having never seen menv I can't say for certain.
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