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Cloth: improved UI
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Authored by Luca Rood (LucaRood) on Sep 13 2018, 3:36 PM.

Details

Summary

This reorganizes the cloth UI, and changes some of the behaviour to be more reasonable.

These are the changes included here:

  • Reorganized cloth panels
  • Improved some tooltips
  • Removed vel_damping option (this had an unphysical implementation and added nothing that can't already be done with air_damping)
  • Removed cloth pinning checkbox in favour of enabling pinning whenever a vertex group is selected for pinning (saves a redundant action)
  • Removed stiffness scaling checkbox in favour of enabling scaling whenever a vertex group is selected for scaling (saves a redundant action)
  • Separated shrinking from sewing, enabling the shrinking option to be used even when sewing is disabled (they are unrelated concepts and shouldn't depend on each other)
  • Separated self collisions from object collisions, allowing their independent use. This avoids computing object collisions when only self collisions are desired.

Here is a side by side visual comparison of the changes (new version on the right):

Versioning could be added to this patch, for example to clear the pinning vertex group when opening an old file where pinning is unchecked, as well as other changes to keep the original behaviour, in parts where some flags have been removed. The question is if it would be more desirable to keep behaviour consistency, or logical consistency. For instance, with the pinning example, one might lose the group they had set in an old file.

Diff Detail

Repository
rB Blender

Event Timeline

Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) requested changes to this revision.Sep 14 2018, 11:47 AM

Seems generally fine.

Regarding removing booleans, it's kind of arguable both ways. On the one hand it's less setup, but on the other it can be useful to quickly toggle booleans for testing, or to animate or override them. For these particular options I don't have a strong opinion.

Versioning could be added to this patch, for example to clear the pinning vertex group when opening an old file where pinning is unchecked, as well as other changes to keep the original behaviour, in parts where some flags have been removed. The question is if it would be more desirable to keep behaviour consistency, or logical consistency. For instance, with the pinning example, one might lose the group they had set in an old file.

I think we should clear the vertex groups if we remove the boolean.

"Property Scaling" is not a term we use in Blender in other places, I think for consistency this panel could be called "Weights".

Are the Quality Steps and Speed Multipler things you would tweak first, with them being at the top of the first panel? To me it seems more like slightly advanced options that you tweak later, so perhaps they could be in a "Simulation" subpanel, with the "Physical Properties" move into the top "Cloth" panel?

This revision now requires changes to proceed.Sep 14 2018, 11:47 AM

I don't think using "Weights" here makes it any easier to understand, as the point of this panel is to vary the value of some properties between vertices by using weights as a tool to interpolate between the base and a new max value. Calling it just "Weights" does nothing towards communicating this.

Added versioning for the removed booleans (required subversion bump). Renamed "Property Scaling" to "Property Weights", as discussed with @Brecht Van Lommel (brecht) and @Alexander Gavrilov (angavrilov) in IRC. Also renamed the "Collision" panel to "Object Collision", to avoid any impression of it being a superset of the "Self Collision" panel (forgot to do that in the original patch).

This revision is now accepted and ready to land.Sep 14 2018, 2:55 PM
This revision was automatically updated to reflect the committed changes.