Graph Editor Backdrop From 3D View
Especially for people using a single or a small monitor, it might be useful to have quick feedback when tweaking animation graphs, by adding a 3D view background to the graph editor.
We use similar backdrops in the compositor and in the sequencer already, so adding this functionality to the graph editor wouldn't break consistency.
Patch available for testing here .
Proposal here (overlay in this case).
6 Comments
I like what I'm seeing in the screenshot. I definitely don't want it to be more complex or feature-fied than it is now. As soon as you open up one option from the viewport, it opens the floodgates for requests for more viewport functionality.
How would it deal with a scene without a camera at all, such as when doing game animation? Would it just use the viewport as you would see it in a dedicated viewport window? Would it throw an error saying you need a camera for it? What about showing decorators like unrenderable objects? It would be useful to show only renderable, but also helpful to see a rig, which is of course unrenderable.
This opens up the question, "What settings does it take from the "display" panel of the viewport properties?" If it takes "only render," then what about AO, DoF, etc.
Some food for thought. I like the idea; it's just the implementation that could get hairy.
Rig visibility: I agree. Silhouette and form are key, not rig pathing.
Display effects: I agree for the most part. DoF wouldn't be very helpful, but there are cases where AO would be useful to see how forms overlap or change silhouette within the larger body silhouette. Sometimes form gets lost within the larger shape of the body. For argument's sake, I would say AO could be useful, although in practice that may prove otherwise. I'll leave a comment/question for the next podcast asking Hjalti about it.
I think we can completely avoid using some fallback condition when lacking a camera. Animators should be animating to a camera anyway, so there's no reason to not have one.
(I'm an animator myself, but I don't have the opportunity to work in blender very often for school. Most of these are my opinions based on having or not having these features.)
Reminds me of compositor background preview which has scale and move features.
Or Graph editor overlay on the 3D View like Akeytsu :) Agree !
Akeytsu does that already, perhaps the devs or an experienced blender animator should try the demo youtu.be/74eSHxwoGdQ
I tried akeytsu's version of this feature and found it quite atrocious. In akeytsu, the graph is a background to the 3D viewport, whereas this is a viewport as a background to the graph. I couldn't scale the graph view, first of all, and that drove me nuts to no end because the graph would overlap with other UI elements. Selection was nasty, too, because you were able to select parts of the rig as well as the graph.
That was in the first public beta, so that behavior may have changed in the second beta. It turned me off of akeytsu pretty quick, though. I'm glad akeytsu tried it, but their way is just not for me. This implementation in blender is already much, much closer to how I envisioned it.