Present: Joseph Brandenburg, Juan Pablo Bouza, Luciano Muñoz, Maxime Casas, Sybren Stüvel, Wayde Moss
The main goal of this meeting was to prioritise work for 2.92. The meeting was be open for everybody who’s interested.
Links
Since the Last Meeting
- Sybren created a home page for the module in the wiki.
- Sybren moved TODOs to various columns, deleted, reclassified as Design, or moved to the Bigger Projects wiki page.
- New workboard column “Responsibility of Other Module” has been added. The UI module has a similar column. It’ll allow us to acknowledge a task is animation-related, but that it won’t be addressed by the A&R module.
- UI clarity: Adding a label to indicate where moved items have been moved to. Sybren was to discuss this with the UI team, but this didn’t happen.
- Ctrl+Click in the graph editor for adding a keyframe to a curve should adhere the snapping rules. Bassam suggested this could be looked at for Blender 2.92, and would create a design task for it, but this didn’t happen. Luciano will take over.
- Bundling the Pose Thumbnails add-on with Blender. The envisioned Pose Library functionality of the Asset Browser has been pushed back, so we’ll have to use this add-on for a while longer. Francesco talked with Sybren about this to continue development in the short term, for the Blender Animation Studio team.
- Another topic Francesco discussed with Sybren was a better Bone Picking UI system, which could possibly interact with the active Bone Selection Set.
- Stanislav and Luciano made T82932: Mirror Pose: Custom center of symmetry.
Short-term goals
From last meeting
- Campbell marked T81874: Box Select Keyframes doesnt set an active keyframe as design task. It’s basically superseded by T82359: Stronger binding of Active and Selected now.
- T82588: Box Select selects keyframes when they are hidden by “Only Show Selected Curve Keyframes” has been fixed and is in 2.91.
New short-term goals
- Split X-Mirror option between Mesh Edit and Weight Painting modes, so that each can be enabled/disabled individually.
- Add a “Refresh Motion Paths” operator to the pose context menu, which refreshes all motion paths of the current armature.
TODOs removed to make place for the above
- T47569: Motion paths are not updated was moved to “Needs Investigation”. It is unclear whether the problem described in this task is current.
- T52892: Action Constraint doesn’t evaluate B-Bone properties close as invalid, as it goes against what constraints are for.
Goals for 2.92
Originally planned for 2.92: re-implementing Visual Keying so that it makes sense. Sybren is unsure of the priority of this, though. After some discussion, the conclusion was that it’s a nice feature but probably for a later release.
Copy-paste of world transforms, such as T57003: Copy visual pose and paste over frame range, can can be used for similar things (like performing some changes while keeping the world transform), but has more applications. Work on the Pose Thumbnails add-on also has higher priority.
Smart Action Baking is a goal for 2.92 as well. This basically works the same as regular Action Baking (i.e. evaluate the animation and key the result), except that it only updates existing keys (instead of keying on every frame).
Help Needed
- T82156: Object with Copy Rotation Constraints translates when being parented needs testing.
- T81704: Spline IK “Bone Original” Y-scale Causes Scaling needs feedback, mostly on the gritty details of how Spline IK is supposed to behave. The manual is a bit vague on this.
Discussion topics mentioned last meeting
- Discuss D8296 (NLA: Evaluate Whole NLA Stack in Tweak Mode). The feature is really useful, but the patch is complex. Wayde Moss already has ideas for simplifying things, will be applied after the patch.
Other ideas
- It would be nice if the release notes were linked from the Help menu. To be discussed with the UI team.
- Luciano was wondering if it were possible to show the curves in the graph editor in world space, rather than in local space. This could help fine-tuning things like walk cycles.
- For the “Clean Motion Paths” operator, Luciano suggested swapping the default behaviour when it comes to removing all paths or only those of the selected bones. The current default is to delete all motion paths; he suggests changing that to delete only those of the selected bones. The Shift key can be used to swap to the other behaviour. Which default is used could also be dependent on the selection (one or more bones selected: delete only those paths, no bones selected: delete all paths). Luciano will create a design task for this.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 17 December, 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 before the meeting.
