* Particle system's are comparable to texture slots, which can
only exist within an id block. Particle settings on the other
hand are idblocks which should be pinnable just like textures.
* When particle settings are pinned only properties that make
sense without the actual particle system are shown in the
particle panel.
* New option to distribute particles in a hexagonal grid.
* This is much more stable for fluids than normal grid distribution and looks quite nice otherwise too :)
* Also some small scale code cleanup of grid distribution code.
* Renamed the old split uv's animate option "time" to "age" and added a new option to change the used split frame by frame. These are good changes were suggested/implied by Hannu Hoffren over 3 years ago in his tutorial video! (oh my how time flies)
* Also cleaned up the billboard ui quite a bit. For example now the uv channels can be properly chosen from the existing channels.
* Greetings from farsthary: particle rotation is now taken into account for particle effector direction.
** This gives all kinds of new possibilities as he shows in his blog http://farsthary.wordpress.com/2011/02/08/vortex-particle-simple-tut/.
**The only modification I made to his patch was to use the actual rotated particle direction as the effector direction as this defaults to the particle velocity vector, so no actual new options are needed.
* I also added an "effector amount" setting for particle effectors so that only a part of the particles can be considered as effectors. This makes it possible to create simple "farsthary vortexes" with only one particle system.
* Also some tiny reorganization of the falloff min/max values for a nicer ui.
This removes auto-registration, committed by Martin r30961.
Realize this is a contentious topic but Brecht and myself both would rather opt-in registration.
TODO:
- addons need updating.
- class list will be modified to use weakrefs (should have been done for existing system too).
- will move bpy.types.(un)register functions into bpy.utils.(un)register_class, currently including these functions in a type list is internally ugly, scripts which loop over types also need to check for these.
* There were a lot of settings in the particle panels that made no sense for simple hair and only cluttered up the ui.
* Now these settings are hidden by default unless "advanced" hair options are shown.
* Without advanced options the particle velocity controls are replaced by a simple "hair length" value, which actually corresponds to the grown hair length in blender units.
* Some hair effector options that are actually very useful were not shown in ui. These are now found in the "field weights" panel.
* Particles that aren't shown are now actually deleted (huge memory savings for flat objects).
* Grid distribution for flat objects is now done on the surface object surface without offset.
* Invert grid option wasn't in ui and it didn't work for non-volume grids.
* New parameter to randomize the grid point locations.
* Resolution soft/hard limits changed to even 50/250.
* Argh, particles tab was showing the whole "non applicable settings for fluid particles"-galore as the particle type "fluid" can't be checked from rna using the settings type value. Now the ui is a lot cleaner and only settings that actually effect the fluid particles are shown.
* Viscoelastic springs between the fluid particles can simulate all kinds
of viscous and elastic substances, such as jelly and honey. This is
achieved by creating springs dynamically between neighboring particles
and adjusting their rest length based on stretching/compression.
* This nearly completes the currently intended functionality for particle
fluids. The last missing thing is a surfacing extraction algorithm,
which is needed for a proper representation of a sph fluid.
* I also cleaned up and renamed some of the fluid parameters to make the
ui a bit easier to understand.
* One addition to the patch is an option to use "initial rest length" for
the springs, which uses the lengths between the particles at the time of
spring creation as the spring rest lengths instead of interaction radius/2.
This makes the fluid keep it's original shape better (good for very
viscoelastic materials), but can create large density differences inside
the fluid (not really physically correct for a fluid).
* Viscoelastic springs are stored in point cache as extra data.
* Renamed children to "simple" and "interpolated" as this is
easier to explain and more descriptive than "from particles"
and "from faces".
* Also shuffled the child ui around a bit to make it clearer.
* Child seed parameter allows to change the seed for children
independent of the main seed value.
* Long hair mode for interpolated children:
- Making even haircuts was impossible before as the child
strand lengths were even, but their root coordinates were
not similar in relation to the parent strands.
- The "long hair" option uses the tips of the parent strands
to calculate the child strand tips.
* Hair parting options:
- Hair parting can now be calculated dynamically on the fly
when in 2.49 there was a cumbersome way of using emitter mesh
seams to define parting lines.
- For long hair parting can be created by a tip distance/root
distance threshold. For example setting the minimum threshold
to 2.0 creates partings between children belonging to parents
with tip distance of three times the root distance
((1+2)*root distance).
- For short hair the parting thresholds are used as angles
between the root directions.
* New kink parameters:
- Kink flatness calculates kink into a shape that would have
been achieved with an actual curling iron.
- Kink amplitude clump determines how much the main clump value
effects the kink amplitude.
- The beginning of kink is now smoothed to make the hair look
more natural close to the roots.
* Some bugs fixed along the way too:
- Child parent's were not determined correctly in some cases.
- Children didn't always look correct in particle mode.
- Changing child parameters caused actual particles to be
recalculated.
* Also cleaned up some deprecated code.
All in all there should be no real changes to how old files look
(except perhaps a bit better!), but the new options should make
hair/fur creation a bit more enjoyable. I'll try to make a video
demonstrating the new stuff shortly.
* New option to "Regrow hair" for each frame.
* This was perhaps more a feature request, but there was a similar useful feature called "animated hair" in particles at some point.
* The previous behavior for hair growing was inconsistent to say the least, so this is a nice option to have.
* The actual problem was that the total amount of particles was rendered at all, since only the displayed percentage was calculated correctly.
* New behavior is that before baking (baking is always done for full % of particles) the display % is used for rendering too for dynamic particles.
* Also added a warning below the display % slider to inform about the situation.
layout.prop_object() --> prop_search().
The internal name is uiItemPointerR, in python this can translate into into an Object, however this is misleading.
It can be confused with a blender Object and uiItemPointerR can also be used for strings.
Changed some names when applying.
- render was use_render, changed to show_viewport so call it show_render
- texface shadow was use_shadow_face, changed to use_shadow_cast since this only affects casting.
- transp was alpha_mode, changed to blend_type since its similar to other overlay blending where this property name is used.
- re-arranged UI in a way that gave far too much vert scrolling.
- was added all over for simple things like making text="", layout engine should handle this.
- Ton and Brecht are ok with removing this now. Ton would like to work on the layout engine to make it better support these cases.
poll() function is now a static method in python, this is more correct, matching C where the operator is not created to run poll.
def poll(self, context): ...
is now...
@staticmethod
def poll(context): ...
Pythons way of doing static methods is a bit odd but cant be helped :|
This does make subclassing poll functions with COMPAT_ENGINES break, so had to modify quite a few scripts for this.
* Path drawing now works for non hair particles.
* Should fix the following bugs too:
[#21316] Hair weight drawing is wrong
[#21923] Consistent Crash When Rendering Particle Scene.
[#21950] Path rendering option for particles causes crash
*The narrowui value was hard coded in all ui scripts, made an user preferences option. Basically this value determines on which area width, it should switch between dual/single column layout.
ToDo: The Changes only take effect when reloading scripts/restarting Blender (after saving as default). Will maybe add the "Reload Scripts" operator next to the button in the future.
* Small fix for Fluid Add Button, when in single column mode. Didn't expand like the other "Add" Buttons.
