structure tools

Obsolete Plugin Cleanup

It would be excellent if there was a little utility app, independent of kinemecore probably (but this wouldn't be bad with kinemecore too), that would go and "cleanup" old plugins like structure tools, directory scanner blocking, spooky, gl tools during the alpha port function era, etc., that have been made obsolete by new plugins/have been lumped in with new plugins. Like, how Kinemecore checks for duplicate versions/older versions of a given plugin, or locations being in the wrong place.

I realize that something like that would have to have a static list of some outdated plugins inside the app and patches that replace them, that would be maintained, and that this could get into a pain. Maybe this would be best as an opensource thing where people could update that list themselves.

The purpose of it's being it's own utility app, script, or whatever, is so that someone wouldn't have to start up QC to do a "plugin management".

The "problem" scenario, is that, if you're loading an app that uses patches like Structure Maker or Directory Scanner Blocking that have been gobbled up by other patches over the years (DataTools, FileTools), and the user has them double installed - like, they have Structure Maker AND DataTools installed, not only does QC have problems on start, but it's pretty darn hard to figure out a way to keep your own app from crashing on start, or not initializing, because of the duplicates.

Maybe there's some eloquent way to handle this in the internals of an app, but I sure haven't found it - and I doubt there is in the case of duplicate plugins, when loading them from user, library, or system locations. I don't necessarily want to stop external loading of QCPatches altogether, but I guess that would be the alternative, to making it so the user doesn't have to jump through as many hoops. It just keeps them from using QCPatches installed on their system though (like QB does currently), which is sometimes not an advantage.

Kineme GL tools tutorial

goto10's picture

Hey everyone

Just thought to let you know about my new tutorial.

Although I don't think a lot of the regulars here will see something new, it's for the most part about Kineme tools, so I'd thought you'd might be interested.

Hope you enjoy it!

Joris

Get Mesh Output Port Tooltip Image/ Tooltip Stuff -Structure Tools

It would be convenient to be able to "get" the image that appears at the output of a mesh port tooltip, and be able to render that directly to a Billboard/Sprite, whatever.

The output of a mesh tooltip shows an image (aberrant for the data type), of a post transformed mesh (distinctly different from "get texture" which just removes grabs the texture from the pipeline).

I'm marking this is started/inactive since there's been previous discussion of supplying tooltip info in a structure, or getting namespace info. I'm tagging this as a structure tools thing.

I know that mesh port is "undocumented", but it seems like the mechanism that provides tooltip images is probably well documented... I just don't know if that can be transferred into a full resolution image.

Also, there are tons of "namespace" things that would be great to be able to grab from structures that aren't actually "part" of a structure, and we can't do anything to get at them for making logic decisions.

Structure Smooth/Morph

Right now, it is definitely possible to smooth indexes/keys of an incoming structure and send the values onto wherever they need to go. I'm not aware of a javascript command to smooth everything in an incoming structure, and I suspect that if there is, that performance could possibly be better without using the javascript patch anyway.

I've had the thought that a patch that smoothed every index/key in an incoming structure equally, with similar controls to the smooth patch, would be really user friendly. The idea behind this is that one could have a bunch of static structures that where say, cursive words created with gl points and lines, that morphed from one to another at a user definable pace. If one used the dae mesh loader, and got the vertex info, one could feed it to this structure smooth and then render to GL Points or Lines (or whatever). As one flipped through models, you would see each index kind of move in position and reform to create the new model outline.

My $.02 for the day!

Join Structures (Composition by mlaser)

Author: mlaser
License: (unknown)
Date: 2009.11.04
Compatibility: 10.6
Categories:
Required plugins:
(none)

This is a patch that joins two structures (A, B, C + D, E, F = A, B, C, D, E, F). It’s constructed entirely with built-in patches. It iterates over each member of each structure so it’s not fast by any means, but if you don’t need to join many or large structures, this could be an adequate solution.