2022-07-07 Animation & Rigging module meeting

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

Present: Amélie Fondevilla, Beorn Leonard, Brad Clark, Daniel Salazar, Greg Hendrix, Jeremy Bot, Kevin Burke, Luciano Muñoz, Nate Rupsis, Thibault de Villèle, Thomas Dinges

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:
    • Greg Hendrix, has been working in the game industry for 10 years, long time Maya user, just started learning Blender for job.
    • Thomas Dinges, Development Community Coordinator at Blender, managing releases, helping onboarding. Curious about our module meeting.

Landed

Short-term goals

  • T97980: N-panel visible by default in Animation editors

    • D14910 is almost ready to land.
    • Needs decision on behaviour in the Dopesheet & Timeline editors. The issue is that the behaviour of the Dopesheet and Timeline editors interact with each other, as secretly, internally, they are the same; the Timeline is a special mode of the Dopesheet editor. Currently choosing between two scenarios:
      1. Dopesheet editor always pops open the N-panel on mode switches. Pro: N-panel is visible, also when switching from the Timeline (where it’s hidden by default) to the Dopesheet. Con: it always pops open, even when the user has closed it.
      2. By default the Dopesheet has the N-panel open (so in the Animation workspace, or when creating a new Dopesheet from an unrelated editor, like the 3D view). After its creation, it just follows whatever the user sets (stays open/closed). Pro: This is friendlier to users. Con: it will not show the N-panel when the Timeline is switched to Dopesheet.
    • Luciano & Beorn: timeline & dopesheet should be merged into one.
    • Beorn has his own add-on for this.
    • Brad: if you switch editors, you also know the N-panel. By then the show-by-default has done its work.
    • Decision: Sybren’s patch-on-patch (scenario 2 above) is good. Continuing to pop it open is too much.
    • For a future patch, it would be good to have a visibility flag per Dopesheet-mode. That way the non-Timeline modes can be open by default, and switching around will retain that particular mode’s visibility setting.

  • D14658: Changes to the actions performed by the ‘Start’ and ‘End’ fields of a NLA strip in the NLA editor

    • Has landed.

  • T97477: Dope Sheet standard mode does not show Grease Pencil keyframes

    • Has landed.

  • Maybe we should also add T98712: Lots of animation-related operators do not check if the data is editable or not?

    • Last meeting we decided to wait with this until this meeting, when Bastien Montagne is back from holiday and can hopefully give some more feedback on the technical side of things.
    • Sybren will discuss with Bastien to make things more concrete, get a list of things he already found.
    • Thibault: we should make a list of operations that break or not, then break it down into separate issues. So more of a long-term goal.
    • So no, not for STG.

  • New idea for short-term goal: making all weight painting operations respect the “normalize” option.

    • The idea was mentioned, but not discussed to the point of actually going for a design task.

  • T96787: Edit mode normalize fails to respect non deforming groups or locked groups

Patch Review & Decision Time

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 21 July, 18:00-19 CEST (Your local time: 2022-07-21T16:00:00Z). 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.

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