Present: Bassam Kurdali, Christoph Lendenfeld, JackCai, Juan Pablo Bouza, Luciano Muñoz, Maxime Casas, Sanislav Ovcharov, Sybren Stüvel
The main goal of this meeting was to discuss the current status of patches, bug reports, and TODOs & prioritise them.
To keep the discussion focused, the meeting was timeboxed to 1 hour. The meeting was open for everybody who’s interested.
Links
From Last Meeting
- The Module Home Page now has an explanation of the workboard columns.
- New workboard columns “Design done, low priority” and “Needs Investigation” have been added.
Short-term goals
From last meeting
- User preference to turn off bone group colors in the animation channel list: T82134 is now in master.
- T81874 Box Select Keyframes doesnt set an active keyframe: requires testing by animators. Sybren recently made a Linux build available too, so testing can happen on Windows and Linux now. Bassam will test.
- T81813 Keyframe handles dont follow keyframes: Wayde has a patch, is now in the 2.91 release branch.
Sybren suggested to limit the number of short-term tasks to 3, and this was accepted by the team.
New short-term goals
- T82588 Box Select selects keyframes when they are hidden by “Only Show Selected Curve Keyframes”, which was already happening but became more important now that there is the concept of Active Keyframe. Because of this issue, the active keyframe may be invisible.
TODOs
Last meeting it was decided to limit the number of TODOs to 10.
Sybren did a first pass of TODOs with some suggestion on actions to take. The team accepted his proposals, so he will continue with the cleanup as proposed.
There are also two “TODOs” that are lists from the old wiki (T55365
Animation System and T55366 Editors), both of which at some point should be gone through to extract TODOs from in any of the above lists.
Handling Technical Debt
Decision to be made in the meeting: how to keep track of technical debt. For example Sergey’s comment on D9515.
The wiki will get a “home page” for the module, in the spirit of the UI module. This can then link to a page in which such technical debt can be collected. This page could also hold the Weak Areas of the Animation System that’s currently in Sybren’s personal pages. This module “home page” will then also be the place to find the wiki lists as discussed in the previous meeting.
Actions
- Moving the “Show Channel Group Colors” away from the editor View menu to the user preferences (T82134) caused some confusion in the community, as the much-needed option that they always had to use now seems to have been removed. Sybren suggested leaving a label where the menu item used to be, that explains where it has moved to. This label would be there only for one release (2.91 in this case) and be removed the next. Sybren will discuss this with the UI module team.
- Ctrl+Click in the graph editor for adding a keyframe to a curve currently doesn’t obey the snapping rules, f.e. to create on integer keyframes only. Since Ctrl+Click is now more powerful/useful, the snapping behaviour becomes more important. Bassam suggested this could be looked at for Blender 2.92, and will create a design task for it.
- Sybren will look into bundling the Pose Thumbnails add-on with Blender.
- Stanislav: have a Mirror Pose that can work relative to a certain bone/object, rather than the origin. This bone could be set per rig. He and Luciano will work on a design task for this.
- T76472 Graph Editor: Fcurve extrapolation visibility will be limited to a single on/off switch first. It can then be extended later with more granual visibility selection of extrapolation types.
Notable mentions & ideas
- Luciano: anything that allows the selection of a time range should be able to use preview range as well.
- Christoph: maybe rename it to “Active range” then, because it then becomes the defactor standard for selecting time ranges.
- Convert animation between euler and quaterion:
- Rigify has something that more or less works for this, could be part of Blender.
- Sybren: maybe a separate “Convert Animation Data” button could be shown, when the current rotation mode doesn’t match the animation data.
- Luciano: Animbot suggests rotation mode that gives least problems (like gimbal lock).
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 26 November, 16:00 CET/Amsterdam time. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be linked in the #animation-module channel a few days before the meeting.
Topics for the next meeting:
- Juan-Pablo: Split X-Mirror option between Mesh Edit and Weight Painting modes, so that each can be enabled/disabled individually.
- Discuss D8296 (NLA: Evaluate Whole NLA Stack in Tweak Mode). The feature is really useful, but the patch is complex. This complexity maybe shows that an architectural redesign of the NLA system might be necessary, especially since it could be the stepping stone to a new Animation Layers system.
- Copy/paste of poses, including animation over a time range (T57003). This could possibly be extended with an offset, so that it’s easy extend walk cycles by copy/pasting.
