dr. jon denning
at university, i teach
at cg cookie, i worked on the retopoflow add-on
in writing rf 2, we ran into many, many problems
in this workshop, i wanted to share some of the solutions that we developed for blender 2.79
the good news: blender 2.80 has already solved or is working on solving some of the problems we ran into! (hooray!)
the neutral(?) news: it does mean that the focus of the workshop has changed
in the end, though, my hope is that the cookiecutter toolkit (or at least most of it) becomes obsolete due to even better blender support
this is a workshop aimed for other add-on devs, aspiring and current
focus: to share...
the method:
typically these problems can be broken down in 3 parts...
i'm not an artist
i know the basics of modeling, but that's about it
however, i have used this weakness to my advantage
i ask artists tons of questions about how they do their work
the better i understand their problems, the better i'm able to solve them
learning a little bit of coding might help you better describe your problem to a developer
in general, modeling problems are mostly just labeling problems
"how do i label all my geometry so that i can do something with it?"
good labeling solves the technical side of the problem
python is a general programming language
with all of its packages, python is quite powerful
the blender api gives python an even larger set of functions
however, add-on development is still a "wild west"
rf 1.x tools (contours, polystrips) started as modest modal operators
as these tools grew and matured, they quickly became complex systems
we created frameworks to help us focus our development on what is important: the artist
footnote: sloccount
reported almost 24k lines of python code (11k for rf, and 7k for common)
jonathan: "i frequently follow extrude with loop cut. wouldn't it be nice to have one tool that does both?"
cookiecutter: github.com/CGCookie/addon_common