On 7/17/07, J.B.C.Engelen@...1578... <J.B.C.Engelen@...1578...> wrote:
Bill Baxter wrote:
Excellent! Nice work! What about the skeletal strokes with different begin/end/middle? Is it just the middle part that works now?
What exactly do you mean? Do you propose to blend objects along the path?
In the paper where Hsu coined the term "Skeletal Strokes" he had the concept of an object being divided into three sections along its length. I think he called those sections "head" "body" and "tail". The head and tail are only drawn once at the beginning and end of the path, respectively, and the body is the part that gets repeated or stretched along whatever is left of the space along the path. With your fish example, for instance, it would allow you to apply the fishbones to a path so that there is only one head and one tail, and just the thin bones in the middle get repeated over the length of the path.
At the moment the skeletal strokes effect repeats a certain pattern along the skeleton, but I'll include the combobox options from the pattern-along-path extension so you could also stretch one patternpath along the skeleton.
Stretch/repeat options are good to have. The head-body-tail thing would additionally require some way for the user to specify where those two dividing lines are. In a pinch the UI could be just two boxes where you input a number between 0 and 1. If head divider is 0.0 and tail divider is 1.0, then you get your current behavior. But ideally a graphical way to select those divider points would be nice.
But it just dawned on me that skeletal strokes is not really what your project is about. So the limitations it has are just ones you inherited from some pre-existing non-live path effect that you ported over to be live?
I may have missed some trick, but it seems to me some sort of better UI is definitely needed for these effects that take more than one object as input. The problem is not particular to live path effects. The dead path effects had the same problem. I like your copy-paste idea better than the approach used by some of the dead path effects, where they just assume first item or last item selected is special. But still it's hard to discover, and it doesn't scale to the case where you need to apply 3 things to a path (like different beginning/middle/end objects.) If you have to paste 3 things then you're back to guessing based on selection order.
Maybe I don't understand you completely. But if you have e.g. 4 path type parameters for an effect, you'd get 4 paste buttons next to the 4 path parameters in the dialog. There is no guessing needed.
Oh I see. I hadn't understood that was possible from the demo PNG. Are the pasted effect parameters stored? I mean is it possible after pasting a parameter to apply those same parameters to other paths? If so, it would be really slick if you could put a thumbnail of the currently pasted object there next to the paste icon. Probably not trivial to do though.
--bb