2023-03-09 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
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The meeting was on 2023-03-09T17:00:00Z. 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: Christoph Lendenfeld Denys Hsu ‘cg tinker’, Jason Schleifer, Luciano Muñoz, Marion Stalke, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Paul Thuriot, Sybren Stüvel, Thomas Dinges

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • The drawing backend is going to be replaced soon. Sybren will ask Clément Foucault for more details w.r.t. the timeline.
    • As it turns out, it’s not going to be replaced soon, it’s a low-priority task.
  • Ares Devaux joined our force and is interested in porting Animaide features into Blender itself.

Landed

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

  • #105039: Copy Global Transform: Mirrored
    • MohammadHossein: we could use the 3D cursor as reference transform?
    • Nate: what would be usecase?
    • MohammadHossein: it would lead to more direct interaction in the 3D viewport
    • Christoph likes it, but would also need aligning the 3d cursor to more things rotationally. Currently ‘snap to selected bone’ only positions the 3D cursor at the bone, but doesn’t pick up the orientation.
    • Nate: What about integration into the Ctrl+C ‘Copy Attributes’ menu? Sybren: would be a sensible addition.
    • Paul: Could you use the name to do the mirroring automatically?
    • Sybren: That’s a good idea, and could even lead to a “symmetrize” option for pose mode.MohammadHossein: this could be extended to symmetrizing constraints as well.
    • Christoph: for the wishlist: have the Copy operator work on multiple frames simultaneously.
  • #99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
  • #103855: Animation Editors Paper Cuts
    • Few tiny things left to try out.

Demo: Copy Global Transform with Mirror

Sybren gave a demo of the upcoming Copy Global Transform feature: mirroring over an object or bone.

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #105489: Armature Display: Bone relationship lines
    • Useful by itself, but also preparation for #105466: WIP: New armature draw mode “balls”
    • To decide: for the parent-side position of the relationship line: slider, checkbox, or enum (and then ‘head’/‘tail’ or ‘root’/‘tip’)?
    • Outcome: Discrete choices, enum head/tail. Paul: makes it the same as the names in Python scripts. Luciano: head/tail is confusing.
    • Luciano: this should be an overlay option, not per rig. I think visualization data should not go ‘down the pipe’, because its only relevant to the user /task.
    • Sybren: disagrees, as this option is also heavily tied to the visualisation of the particular rig, and that’s set per armature. At some point we could have viewport overrides for this though, but that’s a different project.
    • Luciano feels ‘relationhip lines’ is to riggers as ‘wireframe display’ is to modellers.
    • MohammadHossein: should be option per bone.
    • To decide: do we change the default (draw from parent tail to child head)?
    • Outcome: Keep default, it matches the default octo visualisation.
    • To decide: direction of relations: do we keep drawing like this (lines to both parent and children of selected bones)? Or add options to only draw to-children or to-parent lines?
    • Module: it makes sense to have this choice, in the viewport overlays panel.
    • About #105466: WIP: New armature draw mode “balls”:
    • Module: it would be nice to be able to control the size of the spheres, and not have them depend on the bone size.
    • Paul: a global size option would make sense, but per-bone control is also nice.
    • Sybren: let’s keep it per bone, as you can just select all bones and alt-drag the size slider to control them all at once.
    • MohammadHossein: This visualisation could be a toggle between ‘bone view’ vs ‘joint view’.
  • #105523: Breaking changes for 4.0
    • We have to prepare humanity for backward-compatible/breaking changes.
    • Already known hotkey changes: removal of 0-9 for collection changes (#105120), and changing the NLA tab key to the ‘full stack’ tweak mode (no task for this yet).
    • Thomas hopes this is ready when 4.0 goes into bcon1: 17th of May.
  • Auto-keyframing indicators
  • #104758: WIP: Animation: Select Grouped operator
    • Sybren suggested putting this patch on hold. It’s depending too much on the current animation data filtering system, which is intended to be replaced.
  • #105041: Animation: Draw channels backdrop in Timeline
    • Pablo Vazquez abandoned the patch.
    • To decide: do we continue the patch? Or, like discussed in the previous meeting, go for a different approach (lock the summary row at the top, do not draw the red background)?
    • Outcome: Nate might be interested in taking over the patch.
  • #100659: “Add F-Curve Modifier” apply only at Active F-Curve
    • What would be the desired default behaviour? Active FCurve only, or all selected FCurves?
    • Jason/Marion/Luciano/Christoph: should work on all selected.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 2023-03-14T11:00:00Z. 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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