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: Beorn Leonard, Brad Clark, Daniel Salazar, James Ledger, Jason Schleifer, Marc, Paolo Acampora, Shubham Patil, Sybren Stüvel, Thibault de Villèle, Wayde Moss
Links
- Google Meet
- A&R Module Meetings agenda for inclusion in your own calendar
- Previous and next meeting notes
- Workboard
- Patches
- #animation-module chat channel
Since the Last Meeting / Announcements
- The Netherlands have switched to summer time last weekend, so doublecheck the meeting time. It’s still 18:00 Amsterdam time, which is now in Central European Summer Time.
- Hjalti got married! (photos)
- Thibault introduces himself: doing a PhD on animation for planning surgery operations, wants to give back to community. Using the NLA, invited by Brad.
Short-term goals
-
T81836: Design: New Graph Editor Key Manipulation Operators
- Ongoing work.
-
T95001: Parent behaviour: Parent to Object without Inverse needs an option to keep transform
- Brad tested, seem to be working.
- Just needs to clean up UI, remove some features, add to the existing “Parenting” menu.
- NLA work by Brad Clark and Wayde Moss
- D10504: NLA: Keyframe Remap Through Upper Strips is ready for review. Required for other, more advanced features.
- UI cleanup work in progress, mostly about scaling strips that does three things at the same time.
Patch Review & Decision Time
- Reminder: when submitting a patch for review, do not add the entire module as reviewer. This was temporarily done as an experiment, and the experiment ended in August 2021. Follow the guidelines on the wiki instead.
-
D12637: Fix T91299: “Repeat” property of NLA strips not updating when split
- Patch is a bit confusing, in terms of effect for artists.
- Thibault has prototype for offset sliding
- D12637 will be abandoned, new patch coming.
-
D13999: Enable action space gizmos
- Was accepted by the module (see previous meeting notes).
- Still needs approval by Campbell Barton, as he oversees the gyzmo subsystem.
-
D14289: Fix setting key shortcuts in the insert keyframe menu items
- It’s a fix for T89560: Insert key dropdown on keymap doesn’t show keying sets anymore
- Adds a new keyframe insertion operator that’s more stable when it comes to keymaps and the favourites menu (Q-key).
- Module is happy.
-
D10102: NLA: Strip Post-transform Horizontal Shuffle
- Only supports horizontal dragging. Vertical dragging requires another patch.
- Works for multiple strips dragged simultaneously.
Presentation by Marc
Marc presents an issue with skeltal animation with shape keys, when the shape key pushes the mesh away from the armature.
DAZ Studio can link armature changes to shape keys, so that the armature stays inside the shapekey-adjusted mesh.
- Presentation
- Blog post on the subject
- Feature Request on RightClickSelect
- Similar issue explained in Maya
- Paolo: This could already work with a surface modifier, could be used to modify the bone positions. Rotations are harder, though.
- Jason: If Blender gets such possibilities, it has to be optional. Bones should stay where they are unless explicitly moved.
- Sybren: The issue is very clear, and looks like something for big Animation project (Animation 202x). It requires quite an overhaul of the shape key system, and also will affect evaluation order in the dependency graph.
- Paolo: Looks like something for Rigging Nodes.
Presentation by James
His company creates various in-house Blender add-ons, and are planning on releasing those publicly as Open Source. They work on creating 3D models + animations of supercars, consisting of large numbers of individual objects (multiple parts for one brake caliper, for example). James gives an example of baking animation of various related objects into simple-to-manage “Animation Groups” via the NLAp; the main use is for exporting to 3D web interfaces via 3JS.
Help Needed
- Daniel shows T96787: Edit mode normalize fails to respect non deforming groups or locked groups.
- Jason shows Move manipulator needs Parent Orientation space for working with bones.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday, 14 April, 18:00-19 CEST (Central European Summer Time), (Your local time: 2022-04-14T16:00:00Z) 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.