2021-03-04 Animation & Rigging Module Meeting

Meetings
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The main goal of this meeting was a status update on ongoing work, and demonstrations of the upcoming Pose Library and the Procedural FCurve Editor add-on.

The meeting was open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: bird_d, Christoph Lendenfeld, Daniel Salazar, Demeter Dzadik, Luciano Muñoz, Sebastian Parborg, Sybren Stüvel

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • The new pose breakdowner design by Christoph (D9054) was demo’d to Ton. He rejected the design, so we will work on improvements.

    • There should be no overlay / overlap in 3D viewport. This makes the interface too messy.
    • Probably the interface will move to the space of the menu bar of the 3D viewport, temporarily hiding the menu itself while the tool is active.
    • Sebastian and Sybren will have a meeting about this next week, hopefully with a few rapid iterations with Ton.

  • Sybren showed the progress on Asset Browser / Pose Library project.

    • “Create Pose Asset” button currently copies animation keys. Luciano: don’t look at keys, only look at the current pose of the bones.
    • Luciano: the pose should be determined by the loc/rot/scale of the bones, the bbbone properties, and maybe the values of custom properties when they are changed from their defaults.
    • Sybren: prefers to not limit to these, and suggests to store all keyed properties at their current value.
    • Daniel: how about animation snippets? They could be copied into the current action of the rig, or possibly added to the NLA.
    • Sybren: this is on the radar, and is one of the reasons that the new Pose Library uses an Action per pose (the current system uses a frame per pose, and an Action is a whole library of poses).

  • Demeter created task T85796: Alt+Click to select overlapping bones.

    • Sebastian has patch, it’s working in edit + pose mode. Demeter tested and is in heaven. Still needs discussion with Sybren about merging & code quality of legacy code.

Short-term goals

  • T57003: Copy visual pose and paste over frame range
    • On hold due to Sybren’s work on the Asset Browser / Pose Library. It is kept as short-term goal, as it is still an indication that this is on the shortlist for development.
  • T83068: Motion Paths: Refresh all is kept on the short-term goals for the same reason.
  • T84520: Confusing Symmetry settings in Weight Painting: Sebastian Parborg is working on this.
    • Counter-argument for keeping the old options was given, but no response yet with actual workflow that would be improved by keeping the old stuff.
    • Sebastian will move option-graying-out code to RNA/C and depend on the object mode, instead of having it in the panel drawing code. That should make things more consistent & easier to update.

Time Selection in Animation Editors

  • Demo of the Procedural FCurve Editor add-on by the author, @bird_d.
    • Demo video
    • The add-on features time range selection with falloff. Falloff can be selected with fcurve interpolation modes.
    • On the selected time range, certain operators can be run to modify the keyframes in that range.
    • Daniel: we could use the same UI for setting the effective range of FCurve Modifiers.
    • As a bonus feature, the add-on can add FCurve Modifiers to all selected FCurves at once.
    • Luciano: Future idea, to give a name to FCurve Modifiers, so that alt-click to change a property can work across multiple selected FCurves (just like with Object Modifiers). This would make working on similar modifiers on all curves of the same object much easier.

Help Needed

Other Things

  • Sybren: Sprite Fright is going to be animated on two’s.

    • Luciano: ‘Stepped’ FCurve Modifier can help with this; see the problem above for why this could be problematic.
    • bird_d: suggests an Action modfier, that gets applied to all FCurves on the Action.

  • Christoph: How about making Alt-click work to select things behind a gyzmo? For example for selecting bones that are obscured by a Rotate gyzmo.

    • Sebastian: This already works in object mode. Give D10426 a try, it might work for you, as that patch just does the same but for bone selection.

Next Meeting

In a reply to the previous meeting notes, @jpbouza asked to move the meeting one hour later.

  • This was discussed, and all present agreed to move the meetings one hour later, to 17:00 CET.

The next meeting will be on Thursday 18 March, 17:00 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.

2 Likes
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Give this man the Nobel right now

Also this is a brilliant idea !

Modifiers such as stepped are used most of the time to animate on twos, so it make sense that it would affect an entire character/scene/action, rather than individual fcurves. It’s great to have it as granular as that, but I would warmly welcome “action modifiers”.

5 Likes
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Action modifiers exists, problem is now you either have control over one by one or over an entire action, but a mid point is really hard and its exactly what you want most of the time.

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I have to admit I never heard of this…! where do I find those ??

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On the Graph editor, on the panel on the right (you need to select a curve first).

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I see only the regular fcurve modifiers… I tried them one by one to make sure and indeed they all affect just one curve, none of them seem to affect all curves in an action. What am I missing ? Are you sure this isn’t part of an addon ?

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They’re not strictly Action modifiers, but NLA modifiers. There you can put them on an action strip.

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Ok thanks for clarifying.

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Yup, sorry about that. I got confused for a moment there. Yo need to push down an action in the Dope Sheet->Action Editor, and then select it in the NLA and in the left panel there’s a tab for Action Modifiers.

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I was today years old when I learned this. :slight_smile:

1 Like
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Yeah, I had the same!