Object and texture library

[Andreas Zehender]

Hi Luis!

Some feedback to the object and texture library (through the mailing list 
because of the list archive)

I hacked together a form with the qt designer
(see http://www.kpovmodeler.org/tmp/objectlibraryform.png).
I think that would be a good layout for the dialog.

Some suggestions:

- The list should be a QIconView showing all objects of one library with the 
rendered preview as icon (like a light table in a photo studio, one of the 
ideas I got from the image browser I mentioned).

- If you select an item, its description and keywords are displayed right as 
well as the object hierarchy in the tree view. I think the existing tree view 
can be extended to be useable without a part. All drag and drop functionality 
would be implemented already. One could then drag only parts of the stored 
object or texture into the scene.

- Libraries should be opened and closed inside the browser, not in the 
settings dialog. Especially two library paths (in the povray page and the 
object library page) are irritating to the user. Maybe we have to rename the 
povray library path in the povray page. Some users sent me mails because they 
found no way to open the povray includes although they added the povray 
include directory to the library paths.
I added tool buttons in the form. These should be included in a toolbar. A 
KToolbar can be used without a main window although mentioned otherwise in 
the documentation. The KDE file dialog uses one, too.

- Do you want to create a library archive for each object and texture? I would 
create one zipped tar for a library. An object is saved inside the archive 
with your three files, but named <id>.xml, <id>.kpm, <id>.png where id is an 
unique number inside the library.

- Objects should be editable inplace in the object browser, maybe with an edit 
and browse mode.
An image drag onto the icon list sets the preview, a kpm object drag onto the 
tree view sets the data. I will extend the povray render widgets to allow the 
user to drag the rendered image around (in the povray render widget and the 
texture preview). I implemented something similar for my master thesis.

- Your objects are restricted to one declaration at the moment (correct me if 
I'm wrong). We should extend this to multiple objects of any kind. Especially 
complect objects consist allways of multiple declarations.

I have no concrete ideas for search results. Maybe they could be displayed in 
a kind of virtual object library, selectable in the combo box.

So far my ideas.
Any comments are welcome.

Greetings, Andreas

-- 
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 Andreas Zehender, Dipl. Ing. (BA)
 Student, 10th semester computer science
 http://www.azweb.de
 az@azweb.de | zehender@kde.org      
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