Hello,
Out of curiosity, how many of you are aware of the userfun.expression feature (documented here) and how many of you are using it? This feature lets one created his own expressions to be used in Flame’s animation editor.
I’m asking because we are thinking about changing it in the future.
If anyone @ytf will have strong feelings about it I guess. Change is good. Burn a few trees, bring down some walls…
I’ve never found it to be useful. Generally when I build expresiions that I will use frequently, I build them into the nodes and save them in my user bin. I suppose I could possibly find a use for them, but I haven’t since 1998 or so.
Same
I have used it for some time and still do. I wouldn’t necessarily object to it ‘changing’ as long as there was another method of doing the same type of thing. As ytf stated, I’ve also embedded expressions into nodes for saving in the user bin for future use and that worked as well.
When I discovered expressions, I used them a lot. I thought it was fun. Other ops hated them and hated my setups because it was so hidden. Over the years, I used them less because of this.
i always thought the expressions would have a good use in motion graphics and saw a good example in after effects. Especially in plugins you could buy there. There didn’t seem to be an easy way to do the same thing in flame ie make a bounce plugin for example then supply to someone else to use. The architecture in after effects seemed a bit more open.
Particles might benefit from this but again that’s also hidden away and to be honest, particles in flame are a bit outdated these days compared to Houdini, Blender and AI (open to being proved wrong by @scottbalkcomscottbalkcom or @Sinan et al)
I imagine this voting is for EOL discussions. I don’t use them. I can’t think of a use for them that would not confound most other ops I work with.