Posing

Copying and organizing poses

The example scene features only a single pose storage tag. If you record a lot of poses, you will want to use several tags to group poses. We have discussed the proper organizing of pose storage tags before. But what happens if you want to copy poses between tags, for example because the sorting and organization needs to be changed? Only one pose dialog can be open at the same time, and drag&drop between tags is unfortunately not possible...

You can, however, use the dialog to store poses independently by switching off the automatic update. If you do that, the synchronisation between tag and dialog is interrupted, and you can manually copy poses from the tag to the dialog and vice versa by using the buttons in the attributes of the tag. The list of poses that is shown in the dialog is actually not identical to the tag list, but only a copy of it that is kept up-to-date by the automatic update. If the automatic update is deactivated, the dialog's list can be manipulated without ruining the tag's content.

Example: Generate a second pose storage tag in the demo scene and assign a meaningful name to it. Click on the old tag to show its pose list in the pose dialog. Now switch off the automatic update.

Delete three of the six poses. Select the new tag. Go to the attribute manager and click on "Get Poses from Dialog". Switch the automatic update on again. You can now click on the two pose storage tags and look at their lists - you just copied three poses to the new tag! (You could now delete these poses from the old tag, and thereby have the original six poses distributed to two tags.)

In that mode, you use the dialog's list as temporary intermediate storage. The tag's contents is not visible at that moment.

Through the four buttons in the tag attributes, you can copy poses into the dialog or fetch poses from the dialog. That suffices to re-order and copy poses from tag to tag in any way necessary:

Note: Do not switch the automatic update on again, unless you just stored the dialog's pose list in a tag! If you switch on the update, the dialog will immediately synchronize with the current selection! If you have selected a pose storage tag at that time, its content will be copied to the dialog list. If another tag type is selected (or no tag is selected at all) the dialog will delete its current list. This behaviour is logical (after all, you just told the dialog to synchronize!), but it may lead to a loss of data from the dialog list. Therefore we recommend that you first synchronize with a tag manually, and then activate the update again. The Collie Tools posing is programmed this way to primarily preserve the tags' data.

This probably sounds more complicated than it actually is. Admittedly, drag and drop between simultaneously shown lists would be easier... well, if I ever have time and nothing more important to do, I may just work on that feature. For now, the presented functionality must suffice.

Limitations of the posing principle

The Collie Tools poses are very flexible, but not a wonder tool.


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