2022-12-22 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: Bassam Kurdali, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Dalai Felinto, Duncan Rudd, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Jason Schleifer, Jeremy Bot, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Paul Thuriot, 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 face: Paul. He’s an “extremely long-time maya user”, and met Brad & Jason years ago in online trainings for Maya. Last Blender conference made him happy to see there’s movement in the module. Works as Valve, where the goal is to get internal development and external users use the same toolset.
  • Charge has been released, with a ‘Making Of’ video.
  • Blender 3.4.1 released last Wednesday.
  • Brush Assets Workflow blog post published by Julien Kaspar. This also will affect the pose library (T103265).

Landed

Short-term goals

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • Dalai will discuss his proposal for some pose library changes (T103265).
    • The most discussed is the pose asset creation workflow, mainly the “Create Pose Asset” button in the Action editor. The big choice: whether assets created by that button end up in the “Uncategorised” asset catalog (Dalai’s proposal for predictability) or the active catalog of the asset browser (current behaviour).
    • Christoph: we could says extra UI element to choose the catalog before clicking ‘Create’. Module agrees.
  • Sybren proposes to remove the “Convert Legacy Pose Library” operator altogether.
    • Module agrees.
  • Just like last meeting, do a vote on what opportunities from the Opportunity Solution Tree to prioritise.
    • Sybren will gather this and last week’s votes.

Help Needed

  • The module could use more people to help extending & updating the Blender manual.
    • Jason: make a video when the manual also moves to Gitea, to show the new workflow.
    • Jason: maybe also video about best practices in add-on development?

Other Discussions

  • Sybren: we discussed replacing the Armature in Animation 2025, but after further inspection of the code, it would be a huge undertaking.

    • Sybren: Instead of removing, let’s treat it like a basis, and add control rigs & other wannahaves as separate “things”. If that gets blocked by the current Armature, we know which concrete problems to solve.
    • Nathan: On the coding side, now every tool has to implement everything twice for object & bones. Build APIs such that the natural way is to unify things. Also: how can we bring Armature-features to Objects?
    • Brad: We should look at current limitations. Tangent ran out of room for more bones.

  • Bassam: about the “parent inverse” matrix in the Opportunity Solution Tree: maybe zoom out & look at how we use transforms in general. Objects have “delta transform”, bones don’t.

    • Sybren: this hooks directly into Nathan’s gripe of the difference between objects & bones. Good idea to put this under the same umbrella.

  • Bassam (after discussing the “Multi Modifier” option in the Armature Modifier): Mesh Deform also works with Armature’s Multi Modifier. That was likely the original reason the “Multi Modifier” option was added.

  • Brad shares a bunch of things:

  • Jeremy might be making an “intro to the Pie Menu Editor”. Worth noting, it’s the most popular thread on Blender Artists.

    • The creator used to be very responsive (within hours), but since August they haven’t replied.
    • With new versions of Blender (3.2+) the addon is starting to break, and the users (myself included) are… concerned.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be in two weeks, on Thursday 5 January, 18:00-19 CET (Your local time: 2023-01-05T17:00:00Z). 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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