Suggestions

[Patryk Kizny]

Hey,

Playing around with synthclipse and like it so far.
As usually, I'll be sharing me notes regarding what can be improved.


It would be very convenient to have some controls for the viewport that would allow to lock aspect ratio or scale it to 100% of the Buffer Size set in the rendering window.
I usually work with Custom buffer size matching the aspect ratio of my final intended rendering. But the viewport does not reflect it - the window scales the content within and does not repsect correct aspect ratio, so it's easy to squeeze your image and very hard to set it to the desired dimensions. Even overriding the default content scaling to 'fit within' window or 'do not resize' (instead of 'fill regardless of aspect ratio) would fix that problem.

 

[Patryk Kizny]

I am a bit surprised there's only a linear interpolation for single-component uniforms - like float etc.
Would be great to have auto-bezier at least. Ideally - full graphic editor for bezier curves, but that's a bit more work-intense I guess.

[Patryk Kizny]

What would be also cool, and pretty simple to do is to add a vertical line on the main timeline to show current position of playhead. Cyrrently the playhead is displayed only underneath, but it is a different scale visually. So when you find a time where you want to add a keyframe it's really tough to find that place on timeline.

[Patryk Kizny]

Marquee rectangular selection on the main timeline view would be a huge help. Currently it's easy to drag entire group, but it's hard to drag a vertical bar of keyframes.

[Patryk Kizny]

Anyways, Synthclipse timeline editor totally rocks!

[_revers_]

Thanks for good word! 

As of your suggestions, I'll try to implement most of the things you mentioned, but rather without graphical curve editor.
What is "auto-bezier"?
I've thought that 1D case of Bezier interpolation is just linear interpolation ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bézier_curve#Specific_cases ). If you can provide me some materials about 1D interpolation I can implement them in Synthclipse.
Or do you mean "easing"/"tweening", not "interpolation"? Like this: http://easings.net ?

BUT... don't expect these features too quick. I have very little free time lately. I'm in the middle of general house renovation and in 3 weeks from now will born my first child, so I would have yet less time.

[Patryk Kizny]

Thanks for taking these into account. No pressure.

Regarding interpolation between one-component values on timeline: linear is usually not enough to render eye-pleasing animations.
I don't know maybe catmull-rom can be used here also. Bezier curves are a standard in most of the graphic and motion software, are well documented and I guess there's a bunch of bits already available.
To be precise, these should be either quadratic or cubic beziers.



Normally they work with control points - so you have a keyframe point on a curve and 2 handle points laying on a tangent line at that keyframe which you use to modify easing of the curve at the keyframe.
You have 2 handles per keyframe and usually they are locked to the tangent. In some cases you can unlock them so that they are sharing the same tangent - then you'e manipulating incoming and outgoing portion of the curve independently, so you have 2 tangents and a discontinuity.

This example shows you 'unlocked' version (1st graph)
http://math.hws.edu/eck/cs424/notes2013/canvas/bezier.html

This is the 'locked' version used in most cases
http://www.victoriakirst.com/beziertool/

But what could be useful for Synthclipse to keep things simple instead of developing a full graphic editor is an auto-bezier option. By that I mean that bezier functions are used for interpolation of values between keyframes, but the control points are generated automatically.

I think this example (scroll down to cubic or quadratic) may give you the idea. I saw a better one somewhere but can't seem to find it now.
http://www.drububu.com/animation/bezier_curves/
https://www.desmos.com/calculator/cahqdxeshd

There's already a bunch of online JS implementations because bezier is being used since HTML5/CSS3 to create CSS-based animations.

Here are some other implementations.
http://jsfiddle.net/halfsoft/Gsz2a/

Here's a package for Unity
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/11278

I am not sure what exactly you may need technically to implement these, but there's a plenty of resources.
I bet there are high chances you find a ready-to use library or code bits that will do the most part of the job.

[_revers_]

Thanks for explanation and links. I will investigate them before implementing the interpolation.

[cKleinhuis]

What is most important is that interpolation exactly matches the key frames, catmul rom does this as far as i know, nevertheless easing is wqually important

[Patryk Kizny]

Kamil, Another thing that would be very desired is a better output formats for rendering.
Currently there's 8-bit RGB Png. Would be great to have 16bpp plus transparency. Can it be easily done?
Another option - Open EXR 32bpp format that has just been added to Fragmentarium thanks to Dick Ulus.

[_revers_]

Rendering to 32-bit float RGBA buffer would be easy. Saving it to OpenEXR or other format - don't know. I will investigate this possibility when I'll be working on the next version of Synthclipse.

[3dickulus]

@_revers_ One big bonus I found with OpenEXR in Fragmentarium was that image output size is not limited by QImage and QWidget @ 16384 or 32768.
The largest test image I've made was 64000x36000 3.1G, some GL trickery was required for the depth to alpha part.
The OpenEXR sources included with Fragmentarium compile as static libs (including zlib with mingw) and is a standalone package so it could be used by any program, if you can use static C++ libraries from java you should have no problems making this work.
The OpenEXR sources I provide have been modified a bit, just a few minor things iirc like syntax, just to get it compiled, no really bright ideas from me in there

[_revers_]

I can't use static libraries from Java but I can make it dynamic. I think you already agreed but I must ask explicitly: Can I use your modified OpenEXR from Fragmentarium sources?

[3dickulus]

  sure you can, happy to help, zlib.dll is also required for compression in shared/dynamic version, OpenEXR and zlib are installed on most up to date linux systems, the only reason I did it this way was to keep the Windows dist from getting cluttered with more dlls.

[_revers_]

Thanks!