2022-11-14 Animation & Rigging off-schedule meeting

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

Present: Amélie Fondevilla, Bassam Kurdali, Beorn Leonard, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Ingo Clemens, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Pierrick Picaut, Rik Schutte, 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

This was the first off-schedule meeting, to keep communication channels open with people who cannot join the regular module meetings. It will be held once per month. During the meeting it became clear that Monday mornings don’t work well for Sybren, as there was no time to properly prepare for the meeting. The next off-schedule meeting will be on a Tuesday (still at 12:00 CET/Amsterdam time).

  • Sybren will write blog post about the Character Animation Workshop.
  • Christoph Lendenfeld starts working next week on Wednesday.

Landed

Short-term goals

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • D16481: Animation: Add channel type options to the Bake Action operator
    • Bassam: this patch seems ok!
    • Sybren: doesn’t this miss non-transform channels?
    • Bassam: depends on the reason to bake, for example when exporting to game animation anything that doesn’t move is irrelevant.
    • Sybren (after checking the code): the baking code is already limited to transforms, and these options don’t accidentally take functionality away.
    • Pierrick: asks about baking custom props. Colin Basnett has unsubmitted patch for this.
      D9875: Animation: Smart Bake Option for Bake Action
    • Sybren: it’s a shame that the patch author isn’t available any more to work on this.
    • Bassam: orthogonal to the previous patch, one doesn’t need to wait for the other.
  • D15718: Add slider to smooth operator
    • Rik: when at 100%, why is the resulting curve not smooth?
    • Module agrees, having control over the percentage is nice, but the result is a bit strange.
    • Bassam: the current code in Blender is doing the same weird thing, it’s not this patch that causes it.
  • D9477: Smooth Implementation
    • Sybren: This performs better smoothing than the previous patch, but doesn’t have the slider. Probably we can combine the two.
    • Rik: Every key seems to be looking at its in-betweens, applying 20 times will straighten out between first and last frame, but doesn’t get fully straight. Maybe just linear interpolation to a straight line would be better?
    • Amélie: Indeed, 100% is currently not “100% linear”.
    • Pierrick: linear interpolation towards a line may loose the “main dynamic” of the motion. To get that effect you could just erase the keys and set interpolation to linear.
    • Bassam: maybe we should think of audio filters, when you want to do things like removing high-frequency noise.
    • Sybren: maybe we should have a dB scale in the slider (i.e. logarithmic and infinite), instead of 0-100%.
  • D9479: Ease Implementation
    • Bassam: likes it
    • Rik: this is great, love this kind of stuff
    • Rik: would be even nicer to have a way to blend this with the original positions of the keys.
    • Sybren: that would require a “2D slider”, where the X-axis is a parameter for the effect, and the Y-axis is how much the effect gets blended in. This would go against what we worked on in the Character Animation workshop, though, as the goal should be to work more in the 3D Viewport than having to jump to the graph editor.
    • Pierrick: what this patch does is very close to what AnimAide can also do.
    • MohammadHossein: we need more tools like these, to apply convolution operations to F-Curves. Care needs to be taken to ensure they make sense on transform data, though – not all auto-(like) filters produce desirable results on motion data.
  • D12331: Dope Sheet: Nested action groups
    • Sybren will close the patch, has been silent for a year after our last feedback.

Next Meeting

The next off-schedule meeting will be on Tuesday 12:00.

The next regular meeting will be on Thursday 24 November, 18:00-19 CEST (Your local time: 2022-11-24T17:00:00Z). 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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