Fragmentarium 3DickUlus - Notes & Suggestions

[Patryk Kizny]

Hey,

A few suggestions on working with current build. The list will grow.
Easy to do, add so much to the UX

UI Tiny Things
* Play button could play from start. At the moment when playhead is on the end you need to manually scrub back to start
* [spacebar] shortcut to toggle playback
* Loop play option
* Saving window positions on quit
* saving custom buffer size and setting on quit
* centering the buffer image + black background
* Save buffer + autoincrement filename

Features
- Linear camera interpolation would be handy. With simple camerawork current splines are headacke

[3dickulus]

[spacebar] and loop options sound reasonable...
uhm... it does have a rewind button
under linux  it remembers window size/position and many settings
it does save buffer and autoincrement filenames when creating images, when adding keyframes,  when saving frags (check "High Resolution Render" dialog) etc.
camera stepping can be adjusted larger or smaller with the mouse wheel and shift key (click in render window), it's manual for now

PS tnx for the input 

[3dickulus]

Now the exe on my website has [spacebar] enabled for animation play/pause and I added a preferences switch for endless looping
thanks again for the suggestion 

[Patryk Kizny]

Thanks for incorporating my suggestions.

With the buffer I meant being able to export the temporary buffer automatically (autosave or just a plain save button) without need for hitting hires rendering.
That helps you browse the history easily while you're searching for the holy grail. If it saved settings along, would be lovely. Ideally that would look like an interactive history of looks/presets.
I worked with other softwares that have it and find it extremely useful.

[3dickulus]

Thumbnails in the presets list? can also save params in image comment/description if the format supports it.

I have thought of moving the "Preview" feature from the HiRes dialog to the main window just to the right of the "SubframeMax" spinbox and adding a save button to the preview window, selecting this Preview button will render an image say 4x the current buffer dim, unless in full screen mode then just save the current buffer.

right now my interest is in making the path points selectable and then movable with the mouse and getting network distributed rendering working.

[Patryk Kizny]

Sure, makes sense.
As I pointed earlier - can you somehow add linear keyframes interpolation for the camera?
Very often I want to render simple moves from point A to point B. In such case the catmull algorithms are not perfect as it adds overshoot and making a plain simple camera move is just not possible.

Also, if you're into messing with the controlpoints in the viewer window, that would be very desireable to add click on fractal to focus option.

[3dickulus]

two points = not good spline

move the camera press F8 then <enter>, repeat as necessary, the trick is to use at least 3.

no moving controlpoints with the mouse, too hard to patch in, for now, when you select a keyframe from the pulldown list it will automatically block-mark the text in the editor, you can then move the camera to a new location and hit F8, it will sense the name and replace the marked keyframe with a new one, that's it because that's all I need to get what I want out of it.

still bugs to fix before I look at anything else, but do feel free to look at the source and offer a patch.

[Patryk Kizny]

Here's one more UI suggestion. Would make UI wy more user friendly and workflow smoother.
I started adding presets manually and then deleting everything say except for light or camera.

In the parameters tab there's a few buttons to reset group / lock / unlock
It would be fantastic to have 'Add Preset' button here that would add preset including only parameters from the tab.

The global add preset from current settings could display a modal window with a set of checkboxes to include or exclude selected parameters groups.

[Patryk Kizny]

1/
An improvement suggestion on the parameters window - I discovered that very often the controls are being laid out in a random and unpredictable order.
It does not follow declaration nor alphabetical order. Would be cool to add some sort of sorting to it, so that at least the sliders and other controls would appear in the same arrangements every time.
Grouping or labeling within tabs would be good too.

2/
If certain uniform+controls declarations are commented in the GLSL code they're still being included in the UI.
Same happens for #ifdef statements followed by the UI controls for parameters

[Patryk Kizny]

Would be very handy to include aspect ratio and/or custom viewport settings in presets.
That way we coyuld preserve the intanded framing when sharing frags.

[3dickulus]

I do like all of these ideas and I have seen/used these things in other softwares.

if the thumbnail image can have a comment embedded with the fragfilename and settings, it would be a great way keep presets organized

[Patryk Kizny]

I can confirm saving window positions on exit does NOT work neither on a MAC OSX nor Win 7.

[3dickulus]

oh well it works perfectly on linux

[Patryk Kizny]

Few more bugs noticed:
1) I can never animate an int slider
2) I can't create an ivec3 slider.
3) Really annoying, but I guess it is something coming from QT - when I want to type in an value into textfield next to slider it after each keystroke it parses the value and pads it automatically so it is not possible anymore to enter next digit. You have to select next digit manually, delete it and then type again.

4) It looks like #Ifdef statements are not honored at all when within #vertex segment

[3dickulus]

1> so far I don't know of any int slider that I need to animate, give me the name and I will look at it.
2> int vec3 (see 1^) do you have an example?
3> not from Qt!!! this is also the case in the original version, I usually copy and paste the whole value or the modifications I am making only require small one time changes. part of this is the way the variable editor and main event loops work together to keep the screen in sync with changes. This bugs me too and should be higher on the priority list of things todo. edit:looking at this right now...

a vec3 should be cast to ivec3 by the compiler when assigned in shader

Code:

uniform vec3 Offset; slider[(0,0,0),(1,1,1),(500,500,500)]
...
ivec3 myOffset = Offset;
...

this should be able to animate.