Hi Martin and everyone!

On Tue, Feb 26, 2008 at 9:56 AM, Martin Owens <doctormo@...400...> wrote:

If anyone is looking for a small simple project that would make great impact they should think about working with me on the simple animation plan; although I've not had a lot of time to work on it other than reading inkscape codebase, I do believe the plan to be a solid starting point.

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:

* implement the svg animation elements : animate, set, animate{Motion|Color|Transform} * figure out a decent UI for editing animations: - a time-based (SMIL oriented) timeline editor to represent / move around keytimes (=keyframes except it's not frame-based but time-based) - an interpolation curves editor * design some animation-related on-canvas items, like: - trajectories (motion-paths) - temporarily overlayed (t-epsilon) / (t+epsilon) state of an object (to mimic onion skinning)

Is that close to what you thought about ?

There are a lot of open questions, like: - should there be an "animation mode" where the animated attributes values are edited, as opposed to a "normal mode" where it's the object attributes that are modified ? - SMIL semantic is quite rich: at first some things might be discarded like repetition or the possibility to define the start of an animation based of some events (e.g. user click or the end of another animation). Those things don't map well in a timeline UI which I guess is the way animators are used to think. - will the canvas scale well to preview large animations sufficiently smoothly ?

Comments welcomed !

regards, Christophe