Subject: Re: Lightwave convenience feature...
From: [email-masked]
To: Multiple recipients of list <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jan 1996 05:38:23 -0500

On Thu, 25 Jan 1996, [email-masked] (Brenden Mecleary ) wrote:
>
>>Couldn't you save the envelope of the one and load it in for another already?
>
>    Yes, but what if a lot of the envelopes are different?  In one 50-frame 
scene that I just rendered, I had six separate envelopes that I had to copy by 
hand.  
>God forbid if I was rendering a large scene that had a dozen or more!  Why have 
>loads of envelopes sitting around on your HD? 

	'Cuz they're tiny?

> I know they don't take up any 
>space (to speak of), but why go through the bother of saving them all, and then 
>having to delete them all once you've loaded them?  And if you make a change, 
you 
>have to save and load all over again, whereas with a copy keystroke, you could 
>just press (for example) C to copy, switch to the envelope you wanted to paste 
>into and press P to paste!  Much quicker than having to save and load!

	Oh, I see.  Well, there's an even better way, and if memory serves 
Videoscape (!) used to use it.

	In Videoscape , or whatever s/w it was that worked this way, when you
had a MOTION file, the MOT information was not embedded in the file, it was
in a separate ASCII file, just like the one you get IF you save a MOT from
LWave.  Since the only thing in the SCENE file was a pointer (that is, a 
filename) it was easy to make global changes if a bunch of elements all used
the same file.  I used this to great advantage a number of times.

	I was frankly disappointed when Allen folded the MOT files and Envelopes
into the SCENE files because, as a general principle in computer science, 
pointers are more powerful than explicit data.  I understand WHY he did it: 
there are various GUI/user issues addressed simply that way, but it did slightly
affect the functionality of the package.  OTOH, it's nice to know that you don't
have to keep track of a bunch of MOT and ENVL files-- dozens and dozens 
sometimes.

	As usual, I'd like to have it both ways, with some kind of checkbox that 
tells Layout to fetch the motion/envelope/whatever from a file rather than from 
the explicit data embedded in the LWS file.  Lord knows how the interface would 
be set up.  Anyway, if it was, that would make group/global changes a snap.

	Possibly GROUPING would be a better way to do this anyway.  There's an
infinite number of ways to approach the complicated job of creating a USABLE 
inteface for something as horrendous as 3D animation -- Allen doesn't have the 
time to explore them all.  Just think of it as job security.

>
>                                                        Brenden Mecleary
>                                                        [email-masked]
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