On 28-03-12 17:16, Valerie wrote:
I think to some degree Josh's comment still applies. There are at least two different toolbars and some dialogs. As a start I think it should be possible to eliminate the edit mode toolbar.
True, now that I look at it, my current toolbar is empty enough to combine the two. Previously I had separate toolbars because each guide type had guide-specific options (like arc guides for radial tiling, and numerical fields). And yes, I should add an unclump.
The unclump option is already in the align and distribute dialog.
... I was also thinking of imposing some limitations:
- No skewing for the center tile, even though P1 and P2 allows for
those. The reason is that this would allow users to more easily switch to other symmetries with rectangular tiles. Even if the user's tile design is a skewed rectangle, it's not like they need the base tile to be one anyway.
This might give some problems when used with the fuse cut method (with or without borders). In principle the user can obviously create a design based on a rectangular tile, but this might not be the most natural. On the other hand, going the other way and allowing interactive editing of the tile might also not be the best way to go, so perhaps you're right, but still.
- I'm thinking of eliminating the rotation centers and force the users
to directly choose say... a P3 guide if that's what he wants. Some handle options may still be available outside of the rectangle guides, but the general shape cannot be changed. The reasoning is: just how desperately does one need to change from P1 to P3 anyway? It may be fun to experiment but it will get confusing fast, and designs for very differently shaped tiles will probably be different too.
This reasoning is partly correct, and I agree that this would definitely not be a "must". On the other hand, I think that some changes might be quite logical, so at some point it might be nice to have the option.
This sounds like a good idea. If I understand correctly your idea is to allow transforming a single tile and then "propagating" that transform to other tiles in such a way that starting from the original/central tile there is a gradual change in the transformation.
I had typed a long list of questions regarding interpolation with some cluttered thoughts regarding the interface, then I saw Veronika's suggestion:
I wonder if the dynamics could be considered as something separate from cloned tiles and could be applied to any selection of objects.
Somehow I think this is simpler too. :S Any objections to treating the features separately?
Partially. One of the things that would make interpolation work really well with tiled clones is that they are conceptually laid out in a grid, so it is clearly defined how many "steps" there are between two objects (even for hexagonal/triangular grids this is not too difficult). With an arbitrary selection of objects this is less so. Of course x/y positions could be used, but I'm not sure this is necessarily what you want. As for the Youtube video, I think I missed that one.
Also, for blur it is quite essential that discrete objects have a single blur value, as SVG does not support "spatially-varying" blur (and it is non-trivial to do support it).
Of course this does not hold for tracing. And jitter and unclump already are available from the align and distribute dialog (to a certain degree at least). But for the more regular transforms and such I'm just not 100% sure that it would suffice.