Present: Bassam Kurdali (@bkurdali), Luciano Muñoz (@looch), Sebastian Parborg (@zeddb), Sybren Stüvel (@sybren)
The goal of this meeting was to address the most pressing topics to work on in the Animation & Rigging module. Longer-term goals will be discussed at a later time.
Short-term goals
To manage short-term goals, Sybren will create a workboard column “Short Term”. This will allow the module to focus on specific tasks without promising which specific Blender release they will be finished in.
Chosen as highest priority short-term tasks are:
- Bone Selection with "select box " Inconsistent
- Insert keyframes while preserving the shape of the curve
- No indication of active keyframe. This task is not so important per se, but it is a requirement for a more important task that allows editing values in multiple selected keyframes and curves simultaneously.
- Various NLA improvements by Wayde Moss.
Medium priority tasks are:
- Fix Animation Channel and Bone Selection Sync
- Pose Breakdowner improvements
- Select empty part of F-curve to select entire curve
Lower priority tasks are:
- Keyframed parameters are not preserved when frame_change_post handler is used
- Different results when keyframing visual transforms and applying transforms manually on IK constraint (a.k.a. “fix visual keyframing”)
Nice-to-Have New Features
These features should be relatively easily added to Blender, given that there are already add-ons that implement the functionality.
Copy/paste world transform
There are various add-ons that provide copy/paste buttons for the world transform of objects and bones. These can be used for FK/IK switching, enabling/disabling constraints, reapplying transforms, etc.
- The built-in Copy Attributes addon has something similar.
- Sybren has another add-on that does this: Copy Visual Transform
On a side-note: bone matrix explanation in the Python API documentation should be clarified/expanded.
Copy/paste Pose
A similar feature as above, but then copy/pasting an entire pose. This functionality already partially exists.
- Allow copy/paste between blend files. This used to work, but isn’t working any more.
- Sybren has the Real Pose Copy add-on for this.
Once the basic functionality is in Blender, it could be improved upon, for example by copy-pasting the pose over a range of frames.
There are basically two ways in which this can be implemented:
- Convert the pose to text, put that on the clipboard, and reconstruct the pose when pasting.
- Save the pose as tiny blend file that’s loaded when pasting.
Both have their own advantages and disadvantages. A design task should be created to flesh this out.
Long-term goal: enrich Timeline/Dope Sheet
Yes, some long-term stuff of course still snuck in.
- Include all time-related data, not just keyframes (like caches, FCurve Modifier time parameters). Make more things editable, for example move keyframes AND cloth sim cache in time.
- Apply changes with falloff over time (f.e. translate already-animated character in space, for all selected keyframes).
Conclusion
There are many animation features in Blender that work ok-ish, but need polishing. The first goal of the Animation & Rigging module will be to work on improving existing features and adding smaller new features.
This meeting was just between (some of) the Animation & Rigging module members. For the next meeting the Jitsi link will be public, and anyone will be welcome to join. It’ll be on Thursday 15 October at 15:00 Amsterdam time.
Manipulating caches in the timeline sounds great as well (or instead this could be a job for the NLA). I can see those are mostly contained projects, and that’s great but I’d love to see an initial plan for an overhaul of rigging too : muscles, node-based constraints, nurbs, bone dynamics & history-dependent constraints, etc. Doesn’t have to be a detailed plan, but interrogating the animations teams on what they’d like to work with a couple years from now would be nice.
