Re: What do you want out of a path API?
Re: What do you want out of a path API?
- Subject: Re: What do you want out of a path API?
- From: Darrin Cardani <email@hidden>
- Date: Tue, 14 Sep 2010 09:52:11 -0700
On Sep 7, 2010, at 11:11 AM, Peter Litwinowicz wrote:
> It would be helpful if we could programmatically change the drawing color of
> the spline. It is also necessary to be able to programmatically make
> individual splines invisible or not (for example, when warping or morphing,
> you'll have two splines for each primitive: a "src" spline and a "dest"
> spline, and it is necessary for the user to be able to see only one set (all
> src or all dest splines) at a time. We normally have a button in our
> plugin's UI where we can do internally within he plugin).
I've been experimenting with this, and I'm not sure it would be useful, given Motion's current UI for splines. Let's say you have a generator or footage (this is from Motion 3, but it's the same in Motion 4) :
Next you apply a couple of splines to it:
Note that only the selected spline shows its control points. Next, let's say the user adds your nifty spline-using plugin to the generator:
In order to change the parameters of your plugin, you have to select either the filter or the thing it's applied to, which in this case is not a mask. In order to show the splines again, you have to select one of the masks, which then causes your filter's parameters not to be displayed anymore:
So hiding and showing splines programmatically won't ever be useful for a plugin to do because when the user is interacting with your plugin, the spline's on-screen control isn't drawn, anyway. And when they select the spline to manipulate it, the filter's controls go away.
However, you could draw it (or not) yourself using the FxOnScreenControlAPI, if we made the path API also available to your OSC plugin. But as I've got it planned right now, you wouldn't be able to change the spline with the path API, as I was planning on making it read-only. (Once plugins can start manipulating the points, we have a lot more work to do to make sure they don't do invalid things to the splines.)
So my point is, that while I could add the functionality to allow plugins to hide and show paths, I don't think it would do what you want.
Darrin
--
Darrin Cardani
email@hidden
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