2022-03-31 Animation & Rigging meeting

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

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

Patch Review & Decision Time

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

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.

5 Likes

Having this aramature shapekey link thing in Blender would be awesome.