site_archiver@lists.apple.com Delivered-To: pro-apps-dev@lists.apple.com Organization: RE:Vision Effects User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US; rv:1.9.1.11) Gecko/20100711 Thunderbird/3.0.6 FxPlug Developers, I've been thinking about what a good path-related API would look like. I'm not saying we're going to implement one. I'm just thinking about how feasible it would be, so I'm trying to figure out what you would want out of one if we did. When I say paths, I mean shapes that a user draws using the bezier, b-spline, or line tools. In Motion, these would be image masks that the user adds to their objects on the canvas. Looking at APIs for other apps which have this sort of access, I see the obvious things, such as enumerating the paths associated with an object or a project, getting the control points and tangents or weights for a particular path, etc. Those are fairly obvious things. (Or at least they seem obvious – I'd love to know if they're not at all useful!) One set of functions I'm not sure is useful is the functions for getting the length of 1 segment of a path, or even the derivative of the length of one segment of a path. Is anyone out there using these sorts of functions? If so, what are you using them for? We primarly need opened splines so draw does not really apply It's useful to add a draw function to test you do the same as us internally Pierre Thanks, Darrin -- Darrin Cardani dcardani@apple.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/jasmin%40revisionfx.com This email sent to jasmin@revisionfx.com _______________________________________________ Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored. Pro-apps-dev mailing list (Pro-apps-dev@lists.apple.com) Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription: http://lists.apple.com/mailman/options/pro-apps-dev/site_archiver%40lists.ap... On 9/1/2010 9:44 AM, Darrin Cardani wrote: Looking at our internal use of paths, it seems much more frequent that we need to get a point which is some percentage along a path. For example, if you're doing a stroke over time, and you know you're 38% through your time, you want to know the point that is 38% along the path. We use spline length and segment length - internally we have to be able to render the lines... I know Trapcode works directly with control points and tangents for bezier shapes which is the other way Also, do you need to know the mode of the mask? (Add, Subtract, etc.) It seems like in most cases you're drawing something rather than actually rendering the mask and applying it in some way, since that's what the app does for you. But if that functionality is useful, let me know. So if you're using paths in your plugins for other platforms, please let me know what you think of the above questions, and also if there's something missing from other APIs that you'd like to see, let me know! We need to set parameters per spline. For example in our Directional Blur from spline, one can set a value to define the amount of blur affected by a particular spline. In other case we need to set color per spline... When you have time, write to pete and me and we can via a screen share go over how we do things in different apps. Some of our plugins use explicit shape pairing (e.g from and to - show either and lock/invisible the other), from a user point of view, the Fusion model is probably the cleanest for that. This email sent to site_archiver@lists.apple.com