The main goal of this meeting will be a status update on & discussion of ongoing work.
The meeting will be open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).
Present: Bassam Kurdali, Christoph Lendenfeld, Demeter Dzadik, Jason Schleifer, Nico Z, Nico Sanghrajka, Orestis Konstantinidis, Sybren Stüvel
People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.
Links
- Google Meet
- Previous meeting notes
- Workboard
- Patches
- #animation-module chat channel
- A&R Module Meetings agenda for inclusion in your own calendar
Since the Last Meeting / Announcements
- Nico Z (
@gnastacaston Blender Chat) introduces himself. He’s a programmer working in Pittsburgh, interested in helping out with the animation module. Works in the field of medical robotics, submitted few patches already. -
Swing-Twist rotation mode by Damiano Oriti, with demo in another thread
- Jason: at dreamworks they had swing+twist but also “orbit” – he noted this in his response on the thread
- Bassam: Animation Master also had interesting rotation modes, like setting rotations in Euler angles, but having a different interpolation (like quaternions) under the hood, while still working with Bézier handles. Doesn’t remember exactly how nice it was to use
- Nico Z uses Axis/Angle rotation mode in robotics constraints.
- Sybren used Exponential Map for interpolation. It encodes Axis/Angle in 3 numbers (rotation vector, and length of the vector is the rotation angle) – all values in 3D space are valid rotations.
- Alexander Gavrilov will make builds, so that Demeter Dzadik & Hjalti Hjalmarsson (Blender Animation Studio) can do A-B testing of D9551: Fix T82455: precision issues and bug in vec_roll_to_mat3_normalized with axis close to -Y
Short-term goals
-
T81836: Design: New Graph Editor Key Manipulation Operators.
- Christoph moved from implementing new features (because bcon2) to T91973: Design: More frame snapping options
- Bassam also has T89069: Redesign Graph editor Header and Menus to 2.80 Blender UI standards
- Christoph: should snapping options be global? Because keyframes don’t exist globally in all contexts, so a global “Snap to keyframe” would be problematic.
- Nico Z: “Snap To Nearest” would be a good compromise; Module members agree.
- Jason: how would it work with audio & scrubbing?
- Christoph: Probably not that well.
- Sybren: Audio is tricky, there is also a proposal to show the waveform in the timeline. We could have “Snap to Peaks”?
- Nico Z: It could show the mixed/evaluated waveform, based on the VSE. That way you don’t have to select which VSE strip/channel you would want to see.
- Bassam: A separate “Audio” workspace could also be nice, showing the 3D Viewport + the VSE for audio strip editing/scrubbing.
-
T83068: Motion Paths: Refresh all. Jan Willem van Dronkelaar offered to help with this, and by the time you read this, it has been committed to master (so will be in Blender 3.0).
-
T91871: Symmetrize Armature should symmetrize transform of custom bone shape: still up for grabs.
Demos
- Demeter Dzadik gives a demo of his bone gyzmos, and collect feedback from the module.
T92218: Mesh-based armature interaction (“Mesh Gizmos”, “Face Maps”) - Nico S gives a demo of his Action Constraints add-on.
Help Needed
- How to attract more developers? Anyone who can help triage & fix bugs would be welcome.
Next Meeting
Normally the next meeting would be in two weeks, but that is the pre-premiere of Sprite Fright. As such, all Blender Insitute employees will be in the cinema and not able to attend/host any meeting.
The next meeting will be on Thursday 11 November, 18:00 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.