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tools:proposals

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Plugin Proposals

This is a list of plugin ideas that have been vetted and will at some point in time be available for voting by patrons.

UV Transform

Similar in functionality to the UV Distort tool developed in March 2019. However, this will allow you to move, rotate and resize a selection of points in UV space using a bounding box interface. Similar to the transform tool in Photoshop.

Fog Pixel Filter

An attempt to bring old school simple fog back to LightWave 3D. This will change the colour of render samples depending on the distance to the camera, using settings similar to the fog that was available in 2015 and earlier. It will also take the item flags for fog into account. One caveat: Due to the nature of pixel filters, there will be no fog behind transparencies.

Spline Toolkit (S-Tk)

Due to the complexity and breadth, this will be a multi-stage set of plugins. We will try to make sure that a useful addition will be created per month.

However, the first stage will take two months of development to get the foundation right.

Base Stage

A new Primitive Type1) will be developed, called “db&w Spline”.

Initially this will host a Bezier Spline2) which can be open or closed. When selected, it can be edited using a Gizmo3).

Internally, the splines will be managed using a global plugin4) to allow other plugins to discover and use the splines.

To make the spline useful, we'll add a motion plugin as well as an evaluation node that can be used for motion node graphs.

The spline will be static - the control points can not be animated at this stage.

Due to the complexity of getting the architecture right, The Base Stage will be a two months project on Patreon.

Following the base stage, and of the following modules may be added in any order.

Module 1 - Animatable splines

This adds envelopes to the spline controls points and handles and updates the gizmo to allow for keyframing the points and handles.

Module 2 - More Spline types

This adds CSplines (the ones used by default for LightWave envelopes) as well as B-Splines. Splines can be converted, but only the control points are translated. The shape of the curves will change.

Module 3 - Smarter Beziers

Allows for designating a control point as being smooth or hard, this will also be taken into account if the spline is animated.

Module 4 - Deform

Adds a node and a deformer plugin to deform a mesh along a spline.

Module 5 - Proximity Node

A node that computes the closest distance to a spline, this can be used for shading.

Module 6 - Renderable Splines

Allows for splines to be rendered.

1)
Just like Shapes and OpenVDB items
2)
that's the ones with handles
3)
a part of the LW SDK that allows for interacting with items in the viewports
4)
essentially a library that can be used by multiple plugins
tools/proposals.1558956201.txt.gz · Last modified: 2019/05/27 13:23 by lightwolf