2022-09-01 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, Brad Clark, Charles Wardlaw, Demeter Dzadik, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Jeremy Bot, Marc, Marion Stalke, Nate Rupsis, Samuel Bernou, Shriansh Gupta, 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:
    Samuel (@Pullup on Blender Chat), supervisor developer at studio in France, works mostly on add-ons & Python script. Worked on I Lost My Body, Unicorn Wars, several studios. Maintainer of Grease Pencil Tools add-on, bundled with Blender.
    • Fani-Eleni, working in Blender, hobbyist character animation.
    • Charles, former Tangent Animation, interested to see what’s going on in our meetings.
  • SIGGRAPH 2022 was a blast.

Short-term goals

NLA

Marion offers to create working group with Brad, to get the NLA improved
further. They’ll arrange their own meeting/collaboration via Blender Chat, so
that others who are intersted can also join.

Graph Editor ideas by Samuel Bernou

Samuel presented some graph editor improvements. He’s aware of the limited
development power available at the moment, but still wants to discuss some ideas
that might be quite simple to implement.

The module members recognised all the issues Samuel showed, and they were pretty
much all relatively minor things that could bring much quality-of-life to
animators.

Samuel will create Right-Click-Select posts for these, so that we have something
to link to & discuss further. Once there’s someone to actually do the
implementation, tasks could be moved to developer.blender.org.

Patch Review & Decision Time

Preparation for Animation Workshop

We should work on structuring & planning the workshop.

  • 24-26 October: on-site workshop at Blender HQ
  • A few weeks before then: online workshop prep

Broadly: the goal of the workshop will be to have a design for character
animation in Blender, to make it so good we can use it for the next decade.

In the week of 12 September, Ton, Francesco, and Sybren will have a
meeting to define the goals & desires for the workshop more concretely. After
that there will be many more meetings with Animation & Rigging module members &
others to prepare for the workshop.

Various things

  • Jeremy writes: The Rigging Buddies Podcast #19: Helge Mathee. Unreal Engine Control Rig & More is a great intro to Unreal’s new rigging system, and the people involved, AND its relationship to the various rigging systems out there. Honestly, I found it priceless and have watched it multiple times already. I cannot recommend enough.
  • Charles: Pixar’s evaluation system to be introduced to USD, is that interesting to this module?
    • Unfortunately not yet public, it was announced at SIGGRAPH.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 15 September, 18:00-19 CEST (Your local time: 2022-09-15T16:00:00Z). 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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