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This sounds very useful! Maybe look at zbrush 'masking' and mudbox 'freezing' for more ideas of workflow and implementation.
Possibly jumping the gun, but have you given thought to saving pin selections? Would be great if you had a list of pins named 'mouth corners', 'nose', 'cheek' etc, and then be able to add/subtract from your pinned verts based on those selections.
Further, it'd be great to be able to chose pinned verts both by using a brush interface, as well as a volume selection; there'd definitely be times I'd want to use both.
This is a fantastic addition, I would use this constantly. Personally I don't think it belongs in the toolbar, but in the Transform section of the Properties Panel (N). If you are not in edit mode, there are currently locks that are essentially the same functionality as a pin but for object transformations. When in edit mode, it will show you the transformations of highlighted vertices. I think Pin icons would work great there.
Thanks for the feedback you two!
Actually, my first idea on how to implement pinning was to use vertex groups, and I still think adding this possiblility would be good. This would also provide a way to save pins. I'm not sure whether or not to take weighting into account, though. It offers more control yet makes the whole thing less intuitive to work with. (Imagine creating pins using the weight paint mode, and then having the pin falloff interact with that. It could get confusing.) And drawing all pins in the same color even though they have different weight also wouldn't be too great (but can't really be helped in any good way). So one either has to live with that or only allow weights of 1 to be converted to pins.
Concerning a brush-like interface: Pressing c in Edit Mode provides something like a brush for selection, I think this is quite fine. And as already mentioned when/if vertex groups are supported there is also the Weight Paint Mode available.
About where to place the UI: I think that pinning would lean more to the mesh tool direction then to properties. It can't really be completely categorized as either one, so I figure this is a quite controversial topic and it would be great to get more opinions about this. Prefferably after you get the chance to try it out yourself... which is now. :)
Thanks a bunch to DingTo and Fish for making Windows and Linux builds available, here are the links:
Linux 32bit: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1114
Linux 64bit: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1115
Windows 32bit: http://www.graphicall.org/builds/builds/showbuild.php?action=show&id=1123
Frigi 01:16, 19 September 2009 (UTC)
shadowphile posted this on Allan's blog (http://www.blender3darchitect.com/2009/09/using-the-pinning-feature-of-bmesh-for-architectural-modeling/) and I put it here for reference:
This looks like another great feature! I’m concerned though about visibility. Once a bunch of vertices have been locked, it seems like it might be hard to decipher which ones have been locked on which axes. I’m thinking a feature similar to the vertex groups would be necessary, where I can command to highlight all vertices that have a particular axis locked, or something like that.
The pinned axes are not stored per vertex but rather are a global effect, because otherwise it would cause problems really fast as you already mentioned.
I'm currently working on a good concept to support vertex groups and I think storing the axes per vertex group would be the only practicable solution. At least if it gets communicated really well to the user, otherwise it will be just as confusing.
If it even is necessary to be able to pin vertices along different axes at the same time is the question which stands before all that, though. It would be great to get some user feedback on this topic. Personally I think it would confuse more than it would help in most situations.
Frigi 14:47, 25 September 2009 (UTC)
