2022-11-03 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: Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Colin Basnett, Daniel Salazar, David McDermott, Demeter Dzadik, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Ivan Cappiello, Jeremy Bot, Julien Duroure, Marion Stalke, Nate Rupsis, 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

  • Character Animation Workshop was a blast.
  • Our Blender Conference talk was received very well.
  • The Definition of Success defined before the workshop was almost met. The goals were:
    • The Principles. We have those. Discussions at the conference venue, also with other modules, have reconfirmed them.
    • :o: Know what we want to have accomplished by the end of 2023 & 2025. We have a broad idea, but not as concrete as we were planning. We wanted:
      • Concrete list of use cases, expressed as user stories. We have user stories, but not picked specific ones for “end of 2023/25”.
      • Preliminary UI mockups of those use cases. We have mock-ups, which helped a lot during the conference presentation.
      • Have an idea on how to start working on this. See below.
    • Presentation for the conference ready to practice. This goal was also achieved!
  • Jason Schleifer, Brad, and Sybren have worked on an overview of broader tasks, and separating them into “Foundational”, “To Explore”, “Ready to Start”, and “Requires Foundation Work”.
    • Will be exported to SVG/PDF soon.
  • This week Blender 3.4 went into BCON3. This means development now moved into the blender-v3.4-release branch. More info in the wiki article Using the Stabilizing Branch.
  • Module meetings will be weekly now! Every Thursday 18:00-19:00 CET. Note that The Netherlands is now in winter time, which may cause the meeting time to shift for you.
    • The meeting time is not suitable for everybody. There was discussion about having a sync-up hour once per month or so, on a different time/day-of-week. Would be good to have a decision about this.
    • Sybren: 3 Thursdays and then 1 Monday?
    • Jeremy suggests maybe even alternating, but the rest of the module don’t like the idea.
    • Marion: maybe Thursday, before European work hours?
    • Sybren: we should do a call-out to the devtalk forum & Mastodon/Twitter. People who are in this meeting don’t count for the sync-up meeting.
    • Colin: a strawpoll or something would work probably

Landed

High-prio Bugs

Short-term goals & current work

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • Rigify: move under the management of the Animation & Rigging module?
    • Module agrees Rigify is too important to just have one contributor work on it.
    • Daniel: he and Sarah talked with Ivan. Daniel feels it’s important to separate the core from “modules + really nicely done meta-rigs that can be shared”. Also the facial rigging system is amazing, but feels like too much emulating the past instead of going for its full potential.
    • Marion: CloudRig feels like next-level Rigify. Solves issues she often has with Rigify. Maybe also involve CloudRig into our talks?
    • Brad: there is a lot of consistency around Rigify, but not enough coordination.
    • Daniel: Demeter is already working on bringing some CloudRig features into Rigify.
    • Ivan: the effort of this porting is actually done by Alexander Gavrilov.
    • Ivan: it would be good to have a wider discussion about what’s missing in Rigify, and what the long-term goals are. CloudRig was meant to implement things for Blender Studio specifically, and not necessarily for wide public use.
    • Ivan: separates Rigify users into three groups:
      • An animator by themselves can easily generate a rig with a few clicks. For Ivan this is the most important aspect of Rigify.
      • Mid-sized studios (10-100 artists) can use Rigify to generate custom rigs. This could even be from some shared repository (given enough Python scripting knowledge).
      • Large studios might not even be using Rigify, or the same as mid-sized studios.
    • Brad: there are already some efforts to convert Rigify rigs to nodes & back again.
    • D16336: Rigify: port the ability to generate Action constraints from CloudRig.
  • Honorable mention: Jason Schleifer’s first patch: D16353: NLA: Update context menu to include meta strip operators

Help Needed

  • Nate: plugs his website Blunder Training, where he offers help to make things easier for people, mostly aimed at people trying to get into Blender development.
  • Daniel: where is that list of Geometry Nodes, with features they wanted to get ported to nodes? Because he remembers the animation-related ones being marked as not-yet-ported.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 10 November, 18:00-19 CET (Your local time: 2022-11-10T17:00:00Z). 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.

8 Likes
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There have been plenty of lists, but maybe you’re thinking of this? T86839: Converting Modifiers to Nodes

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This is a question to all of the people who are interested in joining the module meetings, but for whom the regular meeting time is unsuitable. Would Mondays at 12:00 CET work for you? If not, what day of the week, or which time, would?

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I think that is 2 AM on the West Coast of the USA. Looks like it’s 6 AM on the east coast, which is OK. Well, I’m in the East Coast and I am trying to wake up earlier anyway.