2021-12-09 Animation & Rigging Module Meeting

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

People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.

Present: Bassam Kurdali, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Daniel Del Risco, Daniel Salazar, Jason Schleifer, Jon Matthis, Kevin Burke, Orestis Konstantinidis, Paolo Acampora, Rik Schutte, Sybren Stüvel

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

New people introduce themselves:

  • Jon Matthis, made free OS markerless mocap system, invited by Sybren.
  • Daniel Del Risco, colleage animator of Daniel Salazar

Announcements:

  • Blender 3.0 released, including the new Pose Library. 3.0.1 is already planned in T93479.
  • Brad worked on roadmap for NLA.
    • Tries to get handle of where things stopped being developed when Wayde left.
    • Separating NLA “features” from simply UI/UX/know-how-it-works issues.

Short-term goals

More Module Members

Orestis & Brad officially become module members.

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • D13470: Fix T93467: Use world background color when rendering pose library previews
    • First patch by Yuchen Wen, reviewed & landed by Sybren.
  • T93776: Channels with F-Curve modifiers persist after their all keyframes are deleted
    • Decision needs to be made about functionality of deleting keyframes.
    • Jason: good to keep around as-is.
    • Paolo: would be consistent with mesh + modifiers, when deleting all vertices.
    • Sybren: deleting an FCurve can already be done by clicking on its label and pressing X.
    • Decided to keep FCurves (when deleting its keyframes but modifiers are still there).
  • D13349: Animation: support filtering for curves that have cycle issues.
    • By Alexander Gavrilov, for improving workflow for animation loops.
    • Jason: what happens with fixed curves? Do they disappear immediately?
    • Paolo: “Cycle error” might need a better term, to avoid confusion with “cycles”.
    • Orestis: Unclear how the last key is used – wouldn’t it be better to enable a “this is looping” setting, and avoid playing back the last frame.
    • Daniel S: Idea is good, but UI design needs some attention.
    • Brad: The “looping” concept could be even bigger than just FCurves and Actions, for example automatically finding the best looping point in an animation and just making it loop. Less “reporting errors” and more “helping in making it loop”.
    • Paolo: warning about baked simulation on top of bones, as it can cause apparent mis-matches that still result in a good loop.
    • Brad: there are many ways in which to loop, should be clearer which kind of “errors” are shown here.
    • Daniel S & Bassam: there are many different reasons for “cycle errors”, should be clearer what the issue is.
    • Bassam: The current UI is for real errors like “this FCurve doesn’t do anything”. These mismatches are more “warning” than error, and should also explain more about what is wrong with it.

Animation UX Demo

Kevin Burke worked on animation UX improvements, and presented his work.
Related: T82359: Stronger binding of Active and Selected

Kevin asked whether someone could explain more about how Blender’s C code works, including the process of patch submissions. Others are enthousiast about such a thing as well.

Sybren will give a walkthrough of the graph editor drawing code, and discuss working in C in general, submitting patches, etc.This will be streamed live on YouTube on Thursday 16 Dec at 17:00 CET time. Sybren will add this to the meeting calendar.

Next Meeting

The next module meeting will be on Thursday 23 December, 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.

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