Re: [K3d-development] The latest in CVS ...

[Ed M. <emi...@di...>]

On Friday 30 May 2003 02:43 am, Timothy M. Shead wrote:
> ... for a tip-of-the-iceberg demo of what the DAG stuff is about there
> is a new script in CVS, dag_test.javascript, that creates two spheres
> and makes the first sphere's radius dependent on the second's.  From
> there, any change to the second sphere's radius (with its spin button,
> via scripting, or whatever) is automagically reflected in the first.
> Use Application Window > Tools > Command Node Inspector to take a look
> at all of the properties available in an open document, consider that
> there can be zero-to-many dependencies among any acyclic combination of
> them, and you should see that there are some very interesting
> possibilities out there!
>
> So, instead of having a channel for each property on an object, we can
> (optionally) connect any property to a channel.  In addition to the
> significant performance and scalability benefits, this also opens things
> up to connect more than one property to the same channel, or create
> "filter networks" between properties - think gstreamer in 3D.
>
> Of course, the devil is in the details and we won't have the ability to
> make all these connections in the GUI for awhile, so I will be
> beefing-up our spin-buttons to allow an automatic create-and-connect to
> a channel - that way we haven't lost any of our existing
> animate-anything functionality.
>
Very cool.  I'll resume connection editing work in the DAG UI as soon as the 
selection work I'm doing is at a breaking point.

This will be an even more powerful capability when we have:

- A script node so we can take an output property from one node, run it in to 
a Javascript each frame, to massage it, and then connect it to an input 
property on other nodes.  Ideally we we want to allow mutilpe inputs and 
outputs in the script node.  We need to figure out a convention to declare 
input and output properties and associate then with variables in the script.

- Take an output property and feed it in to a channel to drive the X axis, 
instead of time, as a way to implement a function where the user can control 
the Y value for Xy editing the curve in the channel.  My guess we need to 
create a time node which will normally drive the X axis property on a channel 
but we could easily disconnect time and connect any other property.

-- Ed Millard