Improve drivers system on Blender
The main idea is to give users more control on drivers out of the Drivers Editor. And improve the usability and potential of drivers in Blenders. 1. The main concept is to include a pickwhip, as seen on After Effects. This is a tool for linking properties to other properties in an easy an interactive way. The way this should work is the following. When you hover over a property in the properties panel, an icon for using the pickwhip is displayed. If the user clicks on that Icon a rope is displayed and the user can point and click to an object on the 3D viewport. When the second object is clicked a contextual menu arises giving the user the oportunity to select amongst the different properties that could be selected. Once the property is selected, Blender should create automatically a driver on the first property linking it to the selected property.2. More system variables could be added. Now you can only type frame. sframe or eframe could became very handy. 3.Properties from the current object should be referenced in a more friendly way. For example if want to link the x rotation of the current object to the x location of the same object this should be done typing something like location.x4. Reference properties from other objects should be easier removing the bpy. stuff. For example something like obj("Cube1").location.x
10 Comments
I would love to see this type of functionality as well. It's very intuitive and fast.
In the meantime there is this "addon" that I find very useful blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php
This is a neat idea. Though I don't think it would be good to have a "pickwhip" icon appear on the property field field, as that would IMO clutter the property interface, and also likely go against Blender UI philosophy. Rather I think there should be a key binding for it, so you hover over the field and press the shortcut key, for the "rope" to appear, similar to what we have with the "I" key, for inserting keyframes.
In general, it's a good idea to avoid describing your proposal by saying "make it like X other software" because you can't expect other users and developers to have the same experience that you do. The pickwhip is pretty unique to After Effects (though it has been replicated in a few other programs). It would be best to start your proposal by describing what that is and then describe how it would work in Blender. Mock-ups are probably essential for getting this across clearly.
Ok. I´ll improve it
the current way with "copy data path" could be very handy, but you can't paste it in another field. It should work with starting to enter a "#" and then paste the data path.
You can add things like frame_end and frame_start by defining your own functions in a registered python script and calling them in the driver. I know its not super simple but it works well and you can go nuts. I used it to create walking ants and all sorts.
dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/38908748/Blender/Images/py_Drivers.png
I also find if you are working on a large project that uses a lot of drivers like a IVT gearbox or something. Rather than having lines of expressions spread across loads of diffrent objects and channels. Its better to write them all in a single .py and call them in the expression seperatly, that way if you need to make changes its all in one place and you dont need to go digging, plus the space for writing expressions is tiny and you will quickly exceed it if you are like me and you go nuts.
Thats a good point (unwieldy size of code) but it would be nice to 'object orient' the expressions if possible.
Honestly that´s a good point. But I think Blender should be able to handle different workflows. And in a lot of motion design projects or other even in characters and mech animation. Drivers could remain most of the time with a single line of code. We need also a fast workflow for that type of works. However I truyly appreciate the power of the PyAPI despite that´s sometimes I find hard to understand.
Also a more clever way to edit drivers UI-wise would be welcome. As it is now, i find it quite buried in the interface.
Yes I have been gently asking for a pic whip like After Effects for years as well. Using a visual metaphor of a little spool of rope to link physically separate fields is cool but as you say unwieldy in a heavily distributed and manipulated UI makes this quite a challenge in Blender. I would like to click and drag a little icon from the source field and place it on another or the object in question. Or perhaps place it in a little icon rock for later use?