mtucker1) Bookmarks on help browser: This is fairly straight forward, a bookmark menu item on the help browser would be nice because many times someone opens the help to go to the same place over and over. This is true for both seasoned veterans and beginners.
Just because we don't currently have a dedicated area for suggestions, don't let that discourage you. Feel free to post suggestions anywhere on here.
2) An Address bar that you can type into: The “clickable” address bar is cool, but it's not very useful for navigation. Just about everyone using houdini would be able to use a simple address bar input like any old web browser. This would work wonders with an auto-complete feature, for example, if I type:
/obj —————– These options would be listed in a drop down as I'm typing:
/obj/ambient1
/obj/cam1
/obj/light1
/obj/light2
/obj/light3
/obj/model
Notice the ordering I put here is alphabetic, I think it may be possible to have ordering based on the order of nodes in a chain, but that may cause too much confusion, because what happens in the case of multiple chains, or two objects on the same level in one chain. Alphabetic would be simple, like the operator tree view (hotkey w).
3) A 3D animation curve editor: This is a feature I've wanted in a 3D program for ages, and I don't know how I would implement it in houdini specifically and unlike the other two, this would actually be a big feature. Now that houdini is entering the character animation world, I think it should be the first 3D program to implement a way to edit translate keyframes (just translate keyframes) in a perspective view. Why? Because virtually all animated translate curves are difficult to visualize and edit when looking at 3 separate curves.
I haven't thought through the interface 100%, but here are some suggestions on how this could work, and work well: It'd be best if you could edit the 3D curve and the 2D curves at the same time, so essentially the 3D interface would just be another way of editing the 2D channels. The color of the animated curve itself could be based on frames for example, maybe +10 frames would be red, current frame would be green and -10 frames would be blue or something of that sort. Opacity could also fall off near +10 and -10 frames perhaps, to make the animated curves simpler. There could also be a tick mark (imagine a particle) on the animated curve to indicate every frame, or maybe every 5 frames or something. I would imagine the “visual” settings for these curves would be in the display options. The interface for editing the curves, I haven't yet decided on, but this is a start. If anyone from sesi wants me to make an image about what I'm describing, just ask, I don't wanna make if it's not gonna get looked at :p. And no, this is not a path, not at all.
Anywho, thanks for reading, sorry for the long ass post, but I didn't wanna make 3 threads one after another.
. I was gonna hold back on that one because it's a big suggestion and I haven't 100% planned it out yet, but maybe I'll come up with some ideas for it soon and post em. Thanks for the compliments though, much appreciated.
