(I've subtly changed the title to reflect that this is specifically about dynamics.)
On 29-03-12 18:20, Veronika wrote:
Still on the topic of having the dynamic properties separate from the tiling tool:
Jasper:
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
I think of the "dynamic options" more as "discrete options" - using the columns and rows you bucket the objects into cells and apply an interpolated value for the whole cell. Using that idea, I think you could apply the discrete options to any selection of objects by superimposing a grid.
Here is a diagram to show what I mean: http://i.imgur.com/eL85r.png
With the grid you can be very flexible, it doesn't have to be Cartesian - you can change the spacing of the grid (in one dimension or both), change the orientation, skew it, rotate it, choose something other than a rectangular grid such as a polar grid or a grid with exponential spacing. One day you could even allow fancy editing of the grid to create custom distortions. ...
I think the idea of separating dynamics from tiled clones is very interesting, but it does sound like it might become a bit complicated. Essentially with tiling you already have a well-defined structure that you can leverage. More or less forgetting about that structure and devising some other way to apply structure (a grid) to the objects seems like a convoluted way of doing things. If it turns out in practice that it is more useful or just as useful to base dynamics on a continuous field that is simply "sampled" by the tiled clones (similar to how tracing works), then I guess that would definitely be a valid option. Also because that corresponds really well to how gradients already work. But I'm not convinced (yet) that adding another way to somehow define a grid over objects to apply dynamics would make sense.
But feel free to try and convince me (and others) :)