2023-05-11 Animation & Rigging module meeting

[sybren]

The meeting will be on 2023-05-11T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: Andy Cuccaro, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, Demeter Dzadik, Denys Hsu, Jeremy Bot, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Nitin Rawat, Omer Almadani, Paul Thuriot, 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

• Brad signed a 3-month contract for 3 days a week, to become product manager for project Character Animation 2025.
• 5 GSoC projects accepted
• Schedule for Q2 published
• BlenderID-to-Gitea hook is active, so changes to your nickname on Blender ID will result in a new username on Gitea as well. This will also change your repository URLs.
• Unreal Fellowship: Animation

Landed

• #104565: Allow select range in animation editor
• #106113: Animation: Clean up “Key” menu in Graph Editor
  • May need updates to the manual.
• #107223: Fix #95855: prioritize selecting keys on active fcurve
• #107763: Add ORIENTATION_PARENT icon
• Fixes:
  • #107745: Matrix conversion can produce non-unit quaternion
  • #104591: Pose Library: crash when using partially-keyed quaternions

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

• #99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
  • #107653: Paint: Add loop select for faces
• #106518: Animation: blend offset slider
  • Christoph: Ares Deveaux (the patch author) will be back soon-ish, probably his sliders will not be for 3.6.
• NLA data corruption issues:
  • #102662: NLA-Strip Corrupted after opening file again in case of library override
    • Probably related to NLA tracks not having a unique name, and thus the Library Overrides system using indices.
    • Nate can look into versioning code to force unique names, but has little time. If someone else has more time, by all means dive in.
    • Sybren will look into this.
  • #106801: Rigify + NLA - assigned action is lost if file is saved while in tweaking mode on rigify generated linked rig
    • Demeter: is this really Rigify-specific?
    • Brad: so far with experiments, it seems to be.
    • Nathan will handle this, Brad will help troubleshoot.
• #107641: WIP: Onion Skinning Prototype
  • Christoph: Quick & dirty approach, just for experimenting and seeing what’s hard about it.
• #106952: Animation: Butterworth Smoothing filter
  • Brad & Christoph worked on this together, soon ready for review.
• #107753: FIX: When motion path is updated, make sure frame range is inclusive
  • There’s a bigger issue in this area of Blender than just this off-by-one.
  • Nate suggests deprioritising and fixing it properly later.
  • Sybren agrees, as this has been how Blender behaved for a long time already, doesn’t need to fix now.
• 30 pull requests open in total.

Patch Review & Decision Time

• Decision time: Date for another workshop at Blender HQ. Smaller one this time.
  • Last week June, first week July. Christoph is not available in the first week of July, so it’ll be the last week of June.
  • Who will join from outside Blender HQ: Brad and Christoph for sure.
  • MohammadHossein will join remotely for simulation / physics discussions.
  • ‘Locals’ from Blender Studio will be discussed with the producers, Fiona & Francesco.
• #86371: Weight paint is broken with Armature Multi Modifier (backport request to 3.3 LTS)
  • To decide: backport to LTS or not?
  • Nathan: this issue was accidentally fixed by some PR, which itself caused further bugs that subsequently also got fixed.
  • Brad: the weight painting being broken is just with the ‘Multi Modifier’ enabled, which is rather undocumented & unknown.
  • Nathan uses ‘Multi Modifier’, but he has a workaround for this issue (disable one of the modifiers before painting).
  • Decision: no back-port, Nathan will document the workaround in the issue report and close it.

Demo by Omer Almadani

Omer demonstrated his pose sculpting brush proof of concept. It works with the groom brush of Blender’s new hair system, and then reprojecting the bones onto the hair.

The module likes it a lot.

Demo by Sybren

Sybren demonstrated PowerShip, a prototype for node-based control rigs.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 2023-05-16T10:00:00Z. 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.