2022-10-13 Animation Workshop Prep meeting

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

Present: Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, David Domingues, Demeter Dzadik, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Jeremy Bot, Joseph Brandenburg, Juan Pablo Bouza, Marc, Marion Stalke, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Sybren Stüvel, Walikour

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

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • Sybren is no longer Blender’s Linux platform maintainer; Campbell Barton took over the role. This means Sybren has more time to work on Animation & Rigging.
  • The workshop signup sheet is being set up for posting ideas to workshop.
    • Marc: clarification about policy on proprietary software is needed.

Workshop

This meeting is for preparation of the Character Animation workshop, to be held 24-26 october at Blender HQ (+ remote).

Relevant documents:

Goal of the Meeting

The goal of this meeting: Going over the “What’s Missing” doc, organizing the ideas into categories.

Most of the meeting was spent on organising that document, and thus these meeting notes are rather small.

Categorising things

Brad: about “Rig Organisation”: are we painting ourselves into a corner if we put these things together?
- Sybren: this is more about conceptual likeness; the techinical side of things is for later.

Joseph: we’re missing a doc: what is Blender doing really well? Armatures, for example, and how it holds the Action, is something Blender does well.
- Are the copy/paste operators for animation unified? in 3D view vs. Dope Sheet.

Marc: Look at the pose tools in Daz Studio for an example of beginner-friendly gizmos.

Sybren: mentions a possible addition of “Joints”, as single-point rigging objects, rather than “Bones”.
- This could be a solution to having custom bone orientation in a non-confusing way.
- Probably better to have this as visualisation option, rather than separate rigging concept.

Jeremy: Wants context-sensitive radial menu when performing actions on specific selections (with gestures).

  • It should be customizable by the animator so that the muscle-memory from the radial menu matches the animator’s preferences.

At the end of the meeting, we have separated almost everything in the “What’s Missing” document into these categories:

  • Rig Data / Stuff that’s stored in rigs
  • Shapekeys & local mesh deformations
  • UI tweaks / papercuts
  • Ephemeral rigging / redefining relations on the fly
  • Custom Animator Insights / data presentation & customization
  • Everything Nodes
  • Animation Organization
  • Animator Interaction
  • Core Animation Representation
  • Animation Layering / Posing / Tools for Secondary Motion
  • To be split up

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Monday 17 October, 17:00-19 CEST (Your local time: 2022-10-17T15:00:00Z). Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested.

The goal of that meeting will be to go over the “to be split up” items, and hopefully also have a glance over the Blank Slate document.

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