2023-02-16 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, Jason Schleifer, Julian Eisel, Luciano Muñoz, Nate Rupsis, Pratyaksh Raj, RedMser, 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 faces:

    • RedMser: hobbyist coder for Blender, got a PR for us, discussed later in the meeting.
    • Pratyaksh Raj: just started developing on Blender, has one PR #104464.

  • We have moved to Gitea on https://projects.blender.org/

    • New links for Issues & Pull Requests.
    • Module labels are used to assign an issue/PR to a module. These are “scoped”, which means that there can be only one module at a time responsible for an issue. This removes the need for our old “responsibility of other module” workboard.
    • The legacy labels were useful during the migration, and will go away soon. They’ll either be removed altogether or renamed to something else. An example of the latter is “Interest / Animation & Rigging”, which is used by other modules to indicate that it’s their responsibility in the end, but still touches on the Animation & Rigging topic.
    • Project should not be set on bug reports/PRs by default. Only things that we want to explicitly put on a ‘project board’ should be assigned to the project. We can add boards like “Short Term Goals”, “NLA”, “Design Tasks”, “Animation 2025”, etc.
    • People with Blender commit/push access can trigger test builds via @blender-bot package. The bot should reply with a download link once the build is complete. For more info see the blender-bot README.
    • Sybren made a GreaseMonkey script for Gitea for easily grabbing links to issues, pull requests, and commits.

  • Sybren’s proposal for working with pull requests on Gitea:

    • PRs are to be tagged with the label “Module > Animation & Rigging”.
    • “Live” PRs should get assigned to the project “Animation & Rigging”. That puts them on the Uncategorised project board. They have to be manually moved to “PRs”, then.
    • The “PRs” board will give us an overview of what is actively being worked on. When they’re shown as “merged” Sybren will mention them in the next meeting notes, in the “Landed” section.
    • After PRs are either merged or abandoned/closed, they can be unassigned from the project so that they don’t appear on a board any more.

  • Cry from the triagers: keep an eye on the unclassified issues.

    • These need to be checked & classified as “working as designedd”, “bug”, “known issue”, etc.
    • Convenience link available on the project page.

  • Blender 3.5 is in BCON3: bug fixing only.

    • main branch is now for new Blender 3.6 features.
    • Bugfixes should be committed to the release branch (wiki)

  • Bassam Kurdali, old-time blenderhead, director of Elephants Dream, currently Asst. Professor at Rhode Island School of Design teaching Blender, writes:

    There’s an opportunity for recent post grads to do a research fellowship for a year at the new (created this year) Movement Lab. It’s open to recent Master of Fine Arts (MFA) grads (not a hard requirement), has a social benefit and open source component - if you have anyone in your networks or the Blender community looking for something like this, please pass the info along! They could potentially get paid to do some new animation system in Blender (or other relevant motion study using or not using computers) for about a year.
    https://www.risd.edu/academics/campus-resources/movement-lab/fellowship

    There’s 2 fellowships per year (each lasts only a year) and the program will run funded for at least the next 3 years.

  • Nate and Brad are working on a parent transform widget, something that’s been discussed in the module meetings multiple times.

Landed

Short-term goals

Demo by Julian Eisel

Julian will demo work in progress on the Asset Shelf, which has the pose library as first deliverable.

Patch Review & Decision Time

Help Needed

  • We need more people to go over the unclassified issues and see what they are about. They shouldn’t be kept in this state for too long, but either classified as “bug”, “known limitation”, or simply “working as designed”.
  • Christoph wants feedback from animators on #104867: Design: Graph Editor Curve Display

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 23 February, 18:00-19 CET (Your local time: 2023-02-23T17:00:00Z). 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.

2 Likes
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hi, i appreciate your awesome work on this module ,wishing the best for your success, if you don’t mind i want to propose some ideas related to select gouped operator — i work with Gpencil often and now we can see Drawing kf and kf of properties in the dopesheet, in that context,

i would like to see a feature to create custom groupe of keyframes (in other words preselection stored to reuse it ) so it easy to select a goupe of keyframes that i desire to move or scale … especially i often work with grease pencil and i want many properties keframes follow a drawing keyframe (that are places in many different frames) . so if i select a grouped kf , all kfs that are linked to this kf got selected by default,

and if we want to select this kf only we can use alt+R click .

with those next operators the workflow will be much more robust:

join selected custom groupes - split - add new kf to existed custom groupe - rename the selected custom goupe - ajuste kf position that is grouped but without any change for the goupe position (which means a local change for a kf without changing for other kfs within the same preselection ) by shortcuts like alt+R click then G to move or scale … etc also an operator to ungroupe a kf and a bunch of kfs . hope this can reach the needs of the community and important for all animators

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Hi @hamza-el-barmaki

Thanks for joining in the discussions. This is not a place to post wishes, though. Please see the blue banner at the top of every page for relevant links.

Sybren

4

hi, and sorry for that.