Hi all. I had a rather panicky reaction on pursing Autodesk Fusion 360 videos:
http://www.autodesk.com/products/fusion-360 Here's a direct link to one of the videos: https://www.youtube.com/embed/KZyjLwKWyOw?rel=0 So! 3D widget interfaces on steroids. I've dome similar stuff in the past, so I thought I'd write up how I went about designing a 3D widget API (to fit inside my Blender-derived application architecture). The basic concept is pretty simple, and is a lot like a 2D user interface API. You have shapes that live in the 3D viewport (and participate in the dependency graph). These shapes have event callbacks (and an "am I still alive" method) and can contain other shapes. They also participate in the dependency graph. Shapes never store direct pointers to data. References to scene objects and the like are stored as RNA paths. In my implementation shape widgets could not go modal. Instead they would invoke modal tool operators, and if necessary insert a temporary DAG node to update themselves interactively. For example, a translate manipulator widget has a DAG reference to the active object. When it invokes transform, the widget automatically moves as the user expects. One final point. 3D widget user interfaces are remarkably difficult to design, and I don't have a lot of talent for that myself. Before any coding happens, we should solicit proposals from people with 3D UI design talent. Anyway, cheers! Joe _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list Bf-committers@blender.org https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers