Hello everyone,
I would like to submit this idea as my summer of code project and of course any feedback/piece of mind from the inkscape community is greatly appreciated.
The Live Path Effect Stack seemed to be *the* thing I always wanted to have in my graphic programs. I have used similar technologies(don't know if this is the right word) before in 3D Studio Max and in Blender, but the way LPES works from what I read is far from what I was hoping for.
The main functional fault of LPES is that it is a stack in my opinion. Consider this example from the LPE-bluprint wiki page: http://wiki.inkscape.org/wiki/index.php/Image:Lpe_need_rich_input.png
The Live Path Effect would need two objects, the cloud and the sun(let's forget for a minute that each of those is itself an object with an LPE applied,) but how can this be done in a stack environment? The obvious way would be to apply the LPE to one object and add a reference(pointer/id...) to the other object as a parameter. This way would most certainly work, but the second object would remain somewhere outside the object with the LPES applied to it, which will make working with a lot of LPES awkward.
How I would like to do it: Instead of using a stack I would like to have an LPE Tree. Each tree node can be either an effect or an object. This way each object can contain a whole hierarchy of editable effects(Similar to Blender and Maya's Node System, but more simple). This would essentially make on-canvas editing of any part of the object(the outline of the cloud, the spike or the circle of the sun) more intuitive as the object itself would contain all the information necessary to build them.
This is a (very) simple mockup for the interface as I imagine it(lots of elements taken from 3d studio max) http://img187.imageshack.us/img187/5057/mockuprv7.png
Wow, this turned out longer than I thought, thank you for reading through it. Afief Halumi