Hi, I commited a first iteration of the spray toolbar refactoring. There is not yet the dropdown list to choose the distribution type. I will do it when I find time in the next weeks. Could you test it and make some feedback ?
I also started to clean up the code. Steren
2009/12/27 Krzysztof Kosiński <tweenk.pl@...400...>
Let's take another approach. Instead of trying to assign meaningful names to existing controls, let's try to figure out what the intuitive controls could be (without thinking about any of their implementation details for now) and then try to adapt the existing controls to this.
I have not seen the spray tool yet. Here are the controls I would expect to find.
- Size: controls how big is the spray, like brush size. This tool
could actually use vector brushes to determine the shape of the spray area, for example a Pick Brush button that would allow one to pick a shape from the drawing, but this is probably not how it was implemented.
- Spray rate or Flow or Thickness: how fast the objects appear or how
many of them there is. This should be relative to the area of the original object, so spraying two different objects with different areas should fill the same fraction of the spray area.
- Focus: how concentrated in the middle of the spray's area the
objects are. High means most objects appear near the center, zero means that objects appear uniformly over the entire area, negative means that objects are more likely to appear near the edges than the center.
Those options would be useful in single path mode:
- Rotation variation: 0% means every object is sprayed exactly as it
is, 100% means that every rotation is equally likely. At 50% the distribution of rotations looks like a sin^2(x): the probability is highest at 0°, then drops to reach zero at 180°, the rises again to reach the peak again at 360°. At 100% it is uniform. It affects the distribution of rotations very much like Focus affects the distribution of objects from the center.
- Maximum scale: 1.0 means no no scaling, 2.0 means objects can be up
to twice as big or small as the original, 4.0 means four times bigger or four times smaller, etc.
- Scale variation: like rotation variation.
Color options are unnecessary, because a variation in coloring can be easily obtained using the Tweak tool. Graphical editing of the distribution might be unnecessary, because the user is going to drag the spray over the canvas and I doubt complex radial distributions would be much different from a simple Gaussian in that situation.
Regards, Krzysztof