2023-03-02 Animation & Rigging module meeting

[sybren]

The meeting was on 2023-03-02T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

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

Present: Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Demeter Dzadik, Dennis ‘cg tinker’, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Jason Schleifer, Marion Stalke, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Sybren Stüvel

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
• Issues & Pull Requests
• #animation-module chat channel

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

• Christoph, Nate, and Sybren had a session to create an overview of Blender’s Animation & Rigging architecture.
  • MURAL
  • Will be published as open graphic soonish.
• Lukas Tönne started working at Blender HQ, on simulation nodes.

Landed

• 45731fd98743: Refactor: Weight Paint Select Linked Faces
• 8a8c1988bd9b: Fix: Using “Frame Channel” in Dope sheet resets view to top
• f5c56b4cd6d8: Animation: Remove the ‘Weight Paint: Fix Deforms’ operator
• 81b56f8bbc0d: Cleanup: Refactor BKE_nlatrack_add to multiple methods to handle adding a new NLA track to the track list. Insert before, after, head, and tail
• cbb4f8a9bade: UI: Add color selector to Bone Groups list

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

• #99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
• #103855: Animation Editors Paper Cuts
  • Christoph: end is near, remaining items are not really paper cuts any more.
  • #104867: Design: Graph Editor Curve Display was split off as separate task.
• #104949: Allow renaming F-curve modifier
  • Brad: would this work on NLA modifiers as well?
• #105039: Copy Global Transform: Mirrored
• #105237: Remove the ‘Weight Paint: Fix Deforms’ operator
  • landed
• NLA linking & library overrides:
  • #105260: NLA is editable even when the animation data is linked
  • #105272: Fix/Refactor NLA Track library override
  • Sybren suggests making this a short-term goal, as it can lead to actual data loss.
• #105120: Animation: Remove collection hotkeys from pose mode
  • Sybren did a poll on Mastodon and Twitter.
  • 82% never uses those keys
  • 12% uses them, but not in pose mode
  • 4% uses them occasionally in pose mode
  • 2% uses them frequently in pose mode
  • Decision is made to remove the 0-9 hotkeys from pose mode.

Patch Review & Decision Time

• Product Manager role for Animation 2025.
• #105301: UI: add parenting (Keep Transform Without Inverse) to menu
  • Brad: might be nice to at some point add such a choice to other places you can parent, like the outliner.
• #104678: UI: File Save Incremental Operator
  • Ctrl+Alt+S is now “Scale B-Bone”, the UI module want to remap this to a new “File Save Incremental”.
  • Jason, Marion, and Nathan always forget the hotkey.
  • Demeter: in bendy bone properties, it’s exposed as ‘Display Size X/Z’. Alt-dragging the properties works to scale all selected bones.
  • Nathan: if it could be in the N-panel properties, it would void the need for a hotkey.
  • Jason: Bone Envelope widget works as well.
  • Demeter: the widget works slightly works differently than alt-dragging the property. One seems to apply an offset to the properties, while the other seems to apply a multiplication factor.
  • Module agrees we can go without Ctrl+Alt+S, those keys can go to incremental save.
  • Ctrl+Alt+Shift+S will likely be hardly used, so neutral about assigning that to ‘Scale B-Bone’.
  • Nathan: why not expand the modal operator keys, similar to x/y/z for axis selection, to have ‘b’ for b-bone, ‘e’ for envelope, ‘r’ for radius?
  • The rest of the people present like that proposal a lot.
• #105041: Animation: Draw channels backdrop in Timeline
  • Jason: Red as default is bad to begin with
  • Nathan: make it neutral, colourless?
  • Sybren is critical of any patch that makes the timeline more like the dopesheet. We should move it away from being like the dopesheet so that it gets more useful. It could be used to select ranges of time, for example.
  • Nathan: why not keep the summary pinned to the top, like in spreadsheets?
  • Module agrees: no colour, pinned to the top, design task for the timeline.

Help Needed

• Widen the NLA action drop-down menu

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-03-09T17:00:00Z. 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.