OK I see.
Unfortunately tackling the foundations of a rock solid implementation is the core motivation for me. I'd like to have the basis for a very general SMIL implementation, that could possibly handle any animatable attributes. The other motivation is to dive into Inkscape codebase in order to learn it, so the plugin approach doesn't appeal much to me. Also I may be wrong but the plugin approach is kind of limited regarding the UI that can be added to Inkscape (see [1] for I'm thinking about) I won't deny that your proposal seems the quickest path to have something working.
As for a GSoC proposal, I'd try to narrow the goals to some simple objectives and maybe write a blueprint.
cheers, Christophe.
[1] http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/SVG_Animation_UI
On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 3:11 PM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:
Hi Martin and everyone!
Hi there, sorry for the delay in getting back to you.
I might actually be interested in this. I don't know what you have in mind precisely about "the simple animation plan", but here are the main possible goals I see:
Not quite, your solution would be a rock solid implementation (or the start of one) what i have in mind is much simpler and is mainly enabling:
Step 1 - Code change to add a slide bar which when enabled quickly switches between layers, causing other layers to be invisible/not editable. This has a benefit on static artists too. Add option for causing the +1 and/or -1 layer to be semi transparent. Step 2 - Write a python based plugin to take the current layer and copy verbatum the layer into a new layer for tweening. Step 3 - Write a _very_ forgiving plugin which outputs an animated svg based on each layer being a keyframe.
This produces some simple animation for us and wouldn't take long to do and wouldn't even change the code base very much and the gui changes are benificial to non animation editing too.
You may or may not want to add to the plugin the ability to control the keyTimes for the keyframes.
This would allow you in a sense to save the document as a normal static svg and a compiled animated svg with different output.
We would be leaning on SMIL which means it won't work in Firefox 2, but will work in adobe svg viewer and mostly work in Opera if you want to test it.
Join me on irc for more chatting.
Best Regards, Martin Owens