2022-06-09 Animation & Rigging meeting

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

Present: Agnes Masanja, Amélie Fondevilla, Dmitriy Ostrovko, Jeremy Bot, Kevin Curry, Kevin Burke, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Shriyansh Gupta, Sonny Campbell, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • New faces:
    • Dmitriy Ostrovko, character artist, uses ZBrush + Blender.
    • Kevin Curry, engineering manager @ Unity, before that did 3D Modeling, works on democratizing 3D on the web.
    • Sonny Campbell, engineer at Unity for 2 years, looking at helping out Blender development at the crossover points between Unity & Blender. Also visited the Pipeline, Assets & IO meeting last week.
    • Agnes Masanja, sw eng at Unity. Wrote her own game engine at university. Want to improve user experience when using Blender & Unity. Also visited the Pipeline, Assets & IO meeting last week.
    • Nathan Vegdahl, animator, worked on Big Buck Bunny and Sintel, now working with Ian Hubert.
    • Jeremy Bot, used Maya for 20 years as animator, has been following Blender since Elephants Dream. Works at animation studio now, worked on Barbie, Madagascar. Has some contributions for Blender as well.
  • A new bone-less character system by Pixar: https://graphics.pixar.com/library/ProfileMover/paper.pdf
    • Ton is contacting Pixar to see if we can collaborate on getting this into Blender.
  • We should plan an Animation & Rigging workshop. The main goal of the workshop: to define the next 5 years of Blender development.
    • Sybren asks for some random, bigger ideas, just to get some balls rolling & heads thinking:
    • Kevin B: parallel evaluation of character rigs, speed improvements.
    • Dmitriy: nodes! Please nodes! Everything, rigging and animation.
    • Jeremy: a way to reverse-engineer a rig. Get a node-like overview of what an existing rig is made of.
    • Nathan: fixing foundational things. Animation system is assuming actions map to individual objects. This is unfortunate when coordinating multiple objects, or doing layering of animations that conceptually group multiple objects as one entity.
    • Sybren: node system for transforms, constraints, parenting.
    • Nathan: collaboration with Geometry Nodes, to have deformation run through that instead of modifiers.
    • Kevin B: weight painting workflow needs work.

Short-term goals

Patch Review & Decision Time

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 23 June, 18:00-19 CEST (Your local time: 2022-06-23T16:00:00Z). 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.

14 Likes
2

when will the animation and rigging workshop take place?

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No concrete date has been set yet, but we’re thinking about the week before the conference.

4

Damn it and I missed this meeting :roll_eyes:

Sybren: node system for transforms, constraints, parenting.

Maybe the node system for transforms also included the suggestion about shapekeys for armatures? If not I like to add this as a topic to the workshop.

@sybren Will this workshop also be remote? Would love to participe at least to the armature/shapekey topic :sweat_smile:

5

What are the qualifications for someone to become the owner of a module and what are the qualifications?

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oh my god. I am looking forward in testing this. Hope we get the option to smooth the transition between the track to surface and i am no longer in reach of the surface so there is no rapid movement in the transition.

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It might be, partially. As said, we need to plan :wink:

You can read more on that on the wiki: Organization - Blender Developer Documentation