2023-01-26 Animation & Rigging module meeting

[sybren]

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

Present: Bassam Kurdali, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Demeter Dzadik, Duncan Rudd, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Jeremy Bot, Marc, Marion Stalke, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Paolo Acampora, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

• Google Meet. Note that there are no recordings of the meeting. This way everybody is free to say or show anything.
• A&R Module Meetings agenda for inclusion in your own calendar
• Previous and next meeting notes
• Workboard
• Patches
• #animation-module chat channel

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

• Christoph started a thread on Devtalk about Animation Papercuts.
• The migration of Phabricator to Gitea is ongoing, taking up most of Sybren’s time.

Landed

• ed178f5ff5a9: Fix: Potential divide by 0 using GRAPH_OT_ease
• 203bacbe4acc: Fix T103809: Using Preview Range Breaks Normalized FCurve Display
• fa67b84c348b: NLA: Udating Blend-in and Blend-out values to clamp on NLA strip Transform

Short-term goals

• T103855: Animation Editors Paper Cuts
  • D17005: Animation: Add “Frame Channel” operators
    • Discussion about using the ‘numerical-dot’ key in the channel list for ‘frame channels’. This is slightly different from other areas in Blender, as the intended use would be to press the key in the channels list, and have the graph next to it change its view.
    • Module agrees this is nice behaviour.
    • Nathan asks for vertical-only framing (so keeping the time range as-is). Nate suggests Ctrl+key for this, Bassam a pie-menu.
  • D17102: Add right margin in channel block of dope sheet and NLA editor
    • No strong feelings from the module.
  • Bassam talks about completely-scrolled-off-screen animation channels, in all anim editors.
    • Much recognition, many people have had this.
    • Nathan: could be a visibility issue of the scrollbar itself. It is overlapped by the channel search box.
    • Nate: this overlaps with #97530 - NLA viewport jumps upward when track search input is focused - blender - Blender Projects
• T99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
  • Marion is happy with progress so far, already makes her work faster.

Demo by Paolo Acampora

Paolo is designing a way for setting up mesh controls more easily: Expy-Kit, and gave a demo.

More videos on: BallsAndNinjas - YouTube

He also shares GitHub - kugelrund/mesh_segmentation: A python addon for mesh segmentation in blender using spectral clustering methods as an interesting way to automatically do mesh segmentation.

Help Needed

• D16857: Widen the NLA action drop-down menu
  • Guidance from the UI module would be greatly appreciated.
  • Animation & Rigging module really would like to see this addressed.
• D17095: Update D10103 to build locally.
  • Nate improved the dragging of NLA strips. Test builds are available, he’s looking for feedback.

Brad plugs Duncan’s Geometry Nodes Caterpillar animation

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 7 February, 12:00-13 CET (Your local time: 2023-02-07T11:00:00Z). 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.