The meeting was on 2023-03-23T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).
Present: Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Denys Hsu, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Harley Acheson, Jason Schleifer, Joseph Hansen, Luciano Muñoz, Nate Rupsis, 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
- Issues & Pull Requests
- #animation-module chat channel
Since the Last Meeting / Announcements
- New faces:
- Harley, 10 year contributor to the UI module, hired since the last few weeks.
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Joseph, Blender user (five years) and animator, Staff member on BlenderArtists.org. He writes: I’ve been sitting on the sidelines of development for a long time but I’d like to be a more active participant. I plan on helping with patches / improving the manual eventually
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Thomas Dinges writes: The
blender-v3.5-releasebranch is now in Bcon4 and frozen to prepare for the release. Only critical and carefully reviewed bug fixes are allowed now. Please keep an eye on the bugtracker for any unexpected high priority regression and add showstoppers to the 3.5 milestone.
Landed
- 45c1deac4f61: Bone relation lines: optionally draw between bone heads
- #104882: Animation: Add duration display to frame range settings
- Fixes:
- 3f88ffb770ca: Fix #100574: Failure to key Quaternions in NLA’s full stack tweak mode (merged in the 3.5 release branch)
Short-term goals / Ongoing Work
-
#99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
- #105633: Animation: Weight Paint select more/less for vertices
- PR for faces exists as well, Christoph will link.
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#105272: Fix/Refactor NLA Track library override
- Moved to lower priority. The situation could be better, but we can live with it for now. Will re-visit when improving this also improves something concrete for Blender users.
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#103855: Animation Editors Paper Cuts
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#105857: Animation: Auto frame curves Y extents when hitting normalize
- Christoph wants some feedback. Basically, should this be a user preference? Or should this just be the new behaviour?
- No strong opinions in the module, so chosen for simplicity and just to add this feature without ability to turn it off.
- Christoph wants to implement the ‘expand channel group on object selection’ idea.
- Christoph also wants to implement drawing line in graph editor when moving keys and locking X or Y axis. Unsure about the design though, will look at the technical side and offer a few different solutions.
- Another thing to implement: creating a new key at the current 2D cursor position; ctrl+click always creates at the mouse position, and that may not be the desired place.
- That should be it, after those things are done, the task will be closed.
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#105857: Animation: Auto frame curves Y extents when hitting normalize
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#105635: Animation: Gauss Smooth operator for Graph Editor
- Christoph will work on another smoothing operator too, one that’s more linearizing instead of Guassian-smoothing.
- Sybren is continuing his investigation of the animation filtering system
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Jacques Lucke is converting
space_action.cto C++. - #106052: WIP: Animation: Improve drawing of locked FCurves
Patch Review & Decision Time
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Pablo Vazquez: approached Sybren about the graph editor ‘Key’ menu:
- About the slider operators: remove the category of ‘how you access’, and group by functionality.
- We can remove “keyframes” from text, as it’s the ‘Key’ menu anyway.
- Some menu items are about channels, so should move into the ‘Channels’ menu instead.
- Sybren: would you do this for 4.0? Pablo: 3.6 is an LTS and will be used for a long time, might be worth it to do it there.
- Harley is willing to do review.
- Related to the 3.6-or-4.0 choice: #105120: Animation: Remove collection hotkeys from pose mode
- Harley: advocates for putting that into 4.0, as it’s a bigger change and people who don’t like it can use 3.6 LTS.
- Brad: the people have spoken, is really a big plus for animators
- Nate: maybe do another twitter poll?
- Brad: when asking people who do use collection switching while animating, they didn’t give any concrete example.
- Decision: leave this for 4.0 + make a little tutorial about how to remove those keys on 3.5 / 3.6.
Documentation Editing Class
Sybren will show how to get the sources for the Blender manual, and show how to make a change and get it into a pull request.
Help Needed
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Pablo Vazquez writes: The documentation about pinning channels needs updating, since it mentions “Graph Editor only” and that’s no longer the case since 3.5.
- Has already been addressed in the Blender 3.5 branch of the manual.
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#97530: NLA viewport jumps upward when track search input is focused
- Harley can look into this.
Next Meeting
NOTE: The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-03-30T16:00:00Z, by which time The Netherlands will have shifted to summer time. This means the time slot may have shifted an hour in your time zone.
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.