There's an aspect of the animplugin that I'm finding can be annoying at
times. This is the fact that it uses the current status in Moray to create
the animations. While this may have many advantages, it can be frustrating
when you happen to click on something, changing it accidentally within Moray
while the animation is being generated. This causes the animplugin to access
the latest state that it finds Moray to be in and uses that to continue with
the animation run.

Xander, my question is this: could you have the plugin write the animation
parameters to a file, and use that file to generate the animation? This
might help in at least two ways: (remember, I'm not a programmer, so I'm not
really aware of all the ramifications here... I'm merely coming from a
user's perspective on this...) It might, #1, keep changes from occurring
accidentally after the animator has spent hours perfecting and refining all
the various aspects of his work, and, #2, it might allow the generation to
happen in the background in another process, freeing Moray itself up to
allow work to continue on the next scene or project.

One really annoying thing that kinda goes along with this is the fact that
the animplugin doesn't change the type of motion of a newly selected entity
to its own setting or to a default setting. For example: say I've been
setting the keyframes of a camera using cubic interpolation and when I'm
finished, I go to select a light to change a previously set keyframe's
parameters. This light's motion was set to linear. When I first select it,
however, the animplugin's setting stays at cubic. Thus if I don't first jump
to another keyframe, the setting will stay on cubic (of course I won't
notice this...) and when I alter that keyframe, voila! the whole path for
the light moves over to cubic. Frustration...

This little gotcha combined with the previous one has caused many hours of
lost tracing. However, this "bug" may also be a feature. Remember April's
discussion in another thread as copied below?

April wrote:
>
>   is there a way to change the type of movement (i.e. step, linear, cubic)
> between frames (i.e. step from 0:0 to 0:1, linear from 0:1 to 0:2 etc,)
or to
> change the type of movement for different objects?

<Xander's reply>Currently, the spline type is the same over the entire
animation.
Individual pieces of an object (in group or CSG) can use different types
of splines (step, linear, cubic).  Separate objects can also use
different types of splines.

If you want the type of motion to be different, you can always break up
your animation into separate scenes.  This isn't all that different from
typical production - you rarely have more than a second or two of an
animation in one scene.  Of course, I need to beef up the
cut/paste/merge capabilities to make life easier when you do that.
-----

Well, you *might* be able to change the path type if you change it in Moray
while the animplug is doing its thing. You'll have to be on your toes,
however, and get the changes in during the proper frame... :-) Haven't tried
this myself, but who knows?

-Kelly
(kla### [at] usacom)

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