The meeting will be open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).
Present: Beorn Leonard, Brad Clark, Daniel Salazar, Jason Schleifer, Kevin Burke, Marion Fisher, Scott Wilson, Sybren Stüvel, Thibault de Villèle, Wayde Moss
People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.
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
- Old pose library has been deprecated (T93405):
The button leads to the Pose Library manual chapter. - Landed:
- While reviewing D14176 Sybren found an issue T97323: Drawing of pose markers does not take NLA time mapping into account
- Do we officially rebrand “pose markers” to “action markers”?
- YES!
Short-term goals
-
T81836: Design: New Graph Editor Key Manipulation Operators
- Ongoing work by Christoph Lendenfeld.
-
T95001: Parent behaviour: Parent to Object without Inverse needs an option to keep transform
- Patch by Wayde Moss was accepted: D14581
- Skew is still an issue, even with the older parenting options. This is for another task to streamline.
- Opens up the question: what to do with the parenting menu?
- Conclusion: will require another design task to flesh out.
- NLA work by Brad Clark and Wayde Moss
- Ongoing work.
While talking about new things to put on the short-term goals list:
- D14015: T95386: Add Discontinuity (Euler) filter to Dope Sheet. was approved conceptually. Just needs code review.
-
T73481: Design: Animation Caching
- Jason: important for many studios
- Brad: deformation chain is slowing things down
- Jason: async evaluation would be great, where slow parts get slow, but the rest remains smooth.
- Jason: primo caches by default, changes invalidate and cause two-way caching from that frame.
- Beorn: can be unstable, apparently hard to implement.
- Daniel: geometry nodes used for deformation. Highlighting the slow node could also help in getting deformations faster.
- Jason: the key is something the artists doesn’t need to think about.
- Might be something to discuss at Blender Conference.
Help Needed
- Colin Marmont’s patch D13687: Use other frame range for motion paths instead of 1-250 was reverted, as it caused some problems with other Motion Path functionality. He’s working hard on his exams, so he could use some help in getting this patched up and ready to and. This should happen in the coming week, to have enough time for the review to happen and the patch to land before bcon2 ends (27 April).
- Wayde can look at it.
Patch Review & Decision Time
-
Decision: Show right-hand panel in animation editors by default? There’s more going on there now (like some pose library buttons, and Colin Basnett is working on a Custom Properties panel for Actions).
- Marion: open by default is good
- Brad: aligns with NLA editor issue of discoverability
- Kevin: new panels are great, but the active-vs-selected is becoming more important then. Being able to edit more than the active FCurve (but all selected) is important.
-
D14345: Fix T96476: Equalize Handles Operator not working on all selected keyframes
- Kevin Burke made useful fix for the Equalize Handles operator, but it just needs a bit of attention before it can land.
- Kevin: changing handle type is ok?
- Module: yes, because dragging handles is also doing this.
Demo by Beorn Leonard
Beorn show off the GAOLIB add-on.
- Most important next step for getting animation snippets in Blender’s own Asset Browser based Pose Library: animated previews.
- This is quite a step up from the current previews, which just store uncompressed bitmaps.
- Something like WebM for video would be a better choice.
- Needs collaboration with UI module and Core module (because previews are stored on ID datablocks, and matter in terms of storage & memory management).
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 28 April, 18:00-19 CEST (your local time: 2022-04-28T16:00:00Z). 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.