Radial Tug Radius Control Point for 2.129

[thyme]

Open Source Seamless3d 2.129 (including French and English versions) is available for download from:

http://www.seamless3d.com/download

In response to Alain's feedback on using the immediate radial tug I have added a draggable control point to the radial tug's circle so that the radius can be resized more easily.
I originally planned to make this new control point cyan to differentiate it from any other control point but decided to make it red because I realised to make it cyan it would require more resources. It would not be a big deal if I made it cyan but the question is does it matter if its red? Feedback from users will be welcome.


The bug Lilly found which causes colouring to fail for the BendyLathe when the Lathe is oriented at certain angles has been fixed. The same problem that existed for the NurbsLathe has also been fixed.

When converting from a NurbsLathe to a BendyLathe in the previous version the transform fields did not get copied. This missing code has been added.

The bug that prevented the BendyLathe control points from being dragged to resize the radius if the last element in the radius field was set to 0 has been fixed.

When adding a floor in previous versions a big problem would occur if any of the new nodes added to the scene had names that matched any of the node's names already existing in the scene. All would appear fine until you tried to reopen the file. This problem was too easy to arise if you added a 2nd floor to the scene by mistake. Seamless now prevents this from happening by creating unique names for the new nodes.

When outputting to POV-Ray, textures are now set to be dithered unlike before where they would appear pixelated.

For FFmpeg the switch -sameq (same quality) gets added to the bat file unlike before. This makes movie files bigger in size but I can see now the quality is significantly improved.

[Alain]

it is a bit stupid , but I dont know how to do more or less than to copy what I wrote on LouiZe

I always thought , and I said it , that a great part of your "art" is in seamless3d , Thyme , the software .
I don't mean that the bikini girl or other stuff is not original art , of course it is ,
but I always admire how you solve some questions in the seamless software ,
always in a "minimal" good way .
It is worderful to look at this "small" improvement in the radial tug ,
easy to use , simple to understand ...





cyan or red , humm , I have no prob with red , it is OK .

I admire how you solve problems like that ,
scuse if it is too much friendly to tell it
But it is how I feel : "art" is in your software too ,
and I am very proud to had been able to follow how it had been improved , step after step ..
Even if I am not the best one to use it .


...

the "model interpolator sounds very nice too ,

I looked at your morpher smls excample , yesterday ,
and I remembered that I tried it motnhs ago ,
but , to tell teh truth , it was not easy


so I tell you good luck to get a more simple way )

[thyme]

Thanks for your very uplifting words Alain
I agree that the Morpher is not the easiest of nodes to use. The Morpher node I can see has advantages the way it is designed and I am sure it could be made easier for editing but I think it would also be good to have a model interpolator node that simply interpolates complete static models. This would not only be good for using the immediate radial tug to pose a model for a key frame in an animation sequence but would also be good if NURBS were used to pose. Coordinate interpolation makes for big files when you morph the entire model but you have much the same sort of flexibility as clay animation and file size is not going to be an issue for making ray traced movies, so its well worth having at least as an option, and it should be very simple to implement for seamless which is good for me the programmer
See feedback can be good Alain, even for opinionated people like my self it can make me see things from a better angle , its the simplicity of your VrmlPad coordinate interpolator example that has got me thinking about this new node
This is not the first time seamless has been improved by feedback either. I did not think collapsible nodes for the scene tree were a big deal a few years ago, I probably would have added this feature eventually but it was because griff, barphe and bumpy requested it I added it sooner than later which proved very good for seamless because the robot is now able to take full advantage of collapsible nodes in the demos and the robot shows just how useful this feature is when navigating the scene tree