The meeting was on 2023-04-06T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).
Present: Ares Devaux, Armin Halac, Brad Clark, Denys Hsu, Ivan Cappiello, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, 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, which contains the issues and pull requests currently being worked on.
- All Issues & Pull Requests
- #animation-module chat channel
Since the Last Meeting / Announcements
- Nathan started working at Blender HQ.
- Google Summer of Code deadline for sending in proposals was last Tuesday.
Landed
- #106302: Animation: Graph Editor - grey out area outside of normalization range
- #105607: Animation: Weight Paint select more/less for faces
- #105633: Animation: Weight Paint select more/less for vertices
-
#105532: Animation: Allow NLA strips to be horizontally shuffled
- Is followed up by #106571: WIP: initial vertical shuffle code
Short-term goals / Ongoing Work
-
#104724: Animation: Add in Parent space alignment option to the Transform Orientation gizmo
- Discussion on Blender Chat, as there is uncertainty about the exact behaviour (always ‘parent space’ vs. ‘always what the bone loc/rot/scale properties indicate’). And as a result, also discussion about what would be an appropriate name.
-
Brad summarized the result of experimentation & discussion:
- ‘Parent space’ = always parent space no matter what, even if it is not reflecting the “local location” option, it should not be tricky, just parent always.
- ‘Pose Space’ (working title) for animation: responsive to the “local location” setting and always allows a 1-1 relationship between viewport translate and transform attributes and the graph editor interpolation.
- So ‘parent’ is called ‘parent’ , always does what it says… and we add the ‘smarts’ to Pose space, for animators.
- Nathan: ‘pose space’ would be more work than ‘parent space’, so do one after the other.
- Brad: ‘parent space’ has consistent meaning, that’s also usable for modelers etc.
- Sybren: ‘pose space’ is already a thing, let’s call it ‘channel space’
- Module likes that.
- Nate: do people like the icon? Sybren: maybe ask Pablo Vazquez, he has a good eye for this.
- Brad: can the icon not be a blocker to get this feature? Sybren: does it work without icon?
- #99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
- #103855: Animation Editors Paper Cuts
Top bar confusion
Nate: the ‘Orientation’ in the ‘top bar’ is different from the orientation in the main 3D Viewport bar.
- Ivan: the one in the ‘top bar’ tool settings is specific for that tool, you can override it per tool if you want.
- Sybren: conceptually the confusion reminds me of the Asset Browser. There the default setting nowadays is ‘Follow Preferences’, so it doesn’t actually tell you which setting is in effect, only where it came from. With the tool-specific orientations, it’s the same thing: it can be set to ‘Default’, where the tooltip explains it’s coming from the scene settings, but it does not show what that scene setting is set to.
Help Needed
-
‘Needs Docs’ column on the workboard keeps growing.
- #104529: Pose Library not functional in 3.5 cannot be added there, because it’s not part of the ‘blender’ project (but the ‘blender-addons’ one).
-
Sybren suggests: if we have time, let’s work on the manual together, to we can go over a concrete change and actually do the entire process of getting changes in.
- Ivan: wants to help, but the manual is hard to edit.
- Nate & Sybren both suggest: https://hackmd.io/
- Ivan: suggests have a priority list. Sybren: there are blender/blender - blender - Blender Projects and Reference/Release Notes/3.6/Animation Rigging - Blender Developer Wiki
- Armin: how to ‘claim’ a documentation task?
- Sybren: use the ‘Assignee’ field of the pull request. Does need you to be part of the ‘organization’ on Gitea: Sign in to Blender ID - Blender ID - blender.org, and it’s not the ‘Documentation’ team that gets access. Sybren will check with infra team to see if we can improve this.
- Sybren: add a comment that explains you’re editing, and add the HackMD URL you’re doing that on. If you set up the HackMD doc to allow editing by anyone who’s logged in, others can even join and help.
- Nate: The bone property ‘Local Location’ is not in the manual.
- Ivan: suggests documenting more ‘usage scenarios’ instead of just explaining what things do.
- Sybren: do add more links to the manual. Relevant sections need to link to each other.
- Ivan: do be careful that concepts are actually linked well, instead of expecting the link target to have the info.
Custom Normals
- Brad: things are getting faster
- Ivan: can we have an option in the Simplify panel to disable custom normal handling, to speed things up?
- Brad: we could investigate, but it’s unclear now how much work it would be.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 2023-04-11T10:00:00Z. 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.