Week 6: Fixing the Timeline issues and equipping it with more features

What did you do this week?

• Improved the PlaybackPanel by adding speed control and the ability to loop the animation. Also, fixed the lagging issue of play and pause buttons and composed them into a single play/pause button.

• Updated the old tutorials’ syntax to match the other tutorials and added a new tutorial on position animation using spline interpolation. Added unit tests for the PlaybackPanel and the newly added color converters in colormap.py.

• Added more hooks to the 2D sliders to cover two more states:

  1. on_value_changed, which gets called whenever the value of the slider is changed without interacting with the slider.

  2. on_moving_slider, which gets called when the position of the slider is changed by user interaction. #634.

  • The reason for adding these two hooks is that there was only the on_change hook, which always gets called when the value of the slider is changed without considering how the value is changed, hence, the functionality of the slider was limited.

• Provided the ability to add static actors to the Timeline, which might be needed in the animation part of Shivam’s glTF project #643.

  • If an actor is added to the Timeline as a static actor, it won’t be animated by the Timeline, but it will get added to the scene along with the Timeline.

• Implemented a custom evaluator for the Timeline’s properties.

  • A custom evaluator uses a user-provided function that takes time as input and evaluates the property at that time. This feature is yet to be discussed more in today’s meeting.

• Fixed camera rotation and the view-up issue when interacting with the scene.

What is coming up next week?

• Make a tutorial on how to implement a new custom Interpolator to work with the Timeline.

• Add motion path visualization feature for both position and color properties.

• Add custom evaluation functions directly, without using the CustomInterpolator.

• Implement an already existing complex interpolator using closures instead of classes.

Did you get stuck anywhere?

I didn’t get stuck this week.

Week 6 - Extracting the animation data   Week 8 - Working on the polyline feature