The meeting will be on 2023-06-13T10:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).
Present: Hjalti Hjálmarsson, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Paolo Acampora, Pierrick Picaut, 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
- 46cf09327001: Mesh: Remove face map list, convert to integer attribute
- Face Maps were removed from Blender by the Modeling module. Existing face maps are converted to integer attribute, their names are lost.
- #108791: Keymap - Draw, Sculpt & Paint Mode Consistency
- Julien Kaspar asked for feedback on the proposed weight painting keymap.
- Test builds are available.
- Gitea was updated, it now renders
.rstfile previews, making online editing of the manual more practical. It has some limitations, but it’s already a big improvement.
Landed
Blender 3.6 fixes:
- 2387290e4f8: Fix #102737: Keyframe jump operator includes hidden curves in Graph Editor
Blender 4.0:
- 6452eccc800: #107126: Make FCurve.update() also deduplicate keys
Blender 4.0 fixes:
- 47ce7bbecc5: Fix: Face loop select toggle behaviour in paint mode
- f6249cc93bc: Fix: Crash when using loop select on edge that has only 1 face
Short-term goals / Ongoing Work
- #107902: Fix #104054: Symmetrize visible ebones when nothing selected
- Testing by riggers would be greatly appreciated: test build
- #106214: Show FCurve modifier toggle widget as ‘inactive’ when there are no modifiers
- Updated with last week’s feedback, ready to land.
- Functionality is considered OK
- Nathan: the icons could be better in terms of what ‘grey’ means and what ‘hollow’ means. White/grey feels more like ‘on/off’, whereas filled/hollow feels more like ‘active/no-modifiers-present-so-inactive’.
- Pierrick: Another issue still exists: the group-level icons don’t show the state of the FCurve-level icons.
- Sybren: That’s an issue indeed, can be fixed by a followup patch.
- #104673: Animation: operators to update the pose library
- #99113: Add Selection functionality to weight painting mode
- Nate: Pablo Vazquez, in an episode of ‘Blender Today’, found an inconsistency between mesh deselect (click to select, click again to deselect) and weight painting mode (click to select, alt-click to deselect). We may want to look at that at some point.
- #106952: Animation: Butterworth Smoothing filter
- Under review by Sybren
- Nathan and Brad worked more on the redesign of the animation data model.
- Mostly discussing requirements based on user stories.
- Thursday Nathan will have a new proposal.
- #4: Loop Nodes
- Marion Stalke is working on a new ‘Solo’ icon for NLA tracks:
Bone Collections
Sybren is working on a new bone collections system that’ll replace the current bone layers & bone groups.
- Selection Sets:
- Hjalti: selection sets is a different thing, needs to be possible to define these per shot-file.
- Hjalti: base selection sets can be defined on the rig, but should be extensible in a shot file without messing up the original. Can also be used as a ‘key these bones’ selection set. Being able to easily transfer selection sets from one file to another is also desirable.
- Nathan: are selection sets usable only for bones/armatures? Or also objects? Hjalti: only for bones right now. Pierrick: could be very interesting for objects too, or for nodes.
- Sybren: let’s remove selection sets from the scope for now. They should eventually get into Blender itself, and not as an add-on, but it’s clear that this would require more design work than just a ‘use as selection set’ checkbox on the bone collection.
- Hjalti: having control over which bones you use exactly is important even for staying on model. Selection sets are super important here
- Hjalti: shift-G has ‘select all bones in same group’ operator, we should keep that working.
- Does every Armature have at least one bone collection? Can there be collectionless bones?
- Possible answer: implicit ‘master collection’ just like in the Scene.
- Does a bone always belong to at least one collection?
- Pierrick: how are bone collections represented in the outliner?
- If a bone is in multiple collections, what determines its colour?
- Nathan: have the bone color as a per-bone setting? That would side-step this issue.
- Hjalti: could make management of these colors harder.
- Hjalti: do riggers use bone groups for more than just setting colors?
- Nathan: if so, then bone collections will cover that too, and be more powerful because bones can be in multiple collections.
Patch Review & Decision Time
- #105574: WIP: Evaluate Red Auto Keying Button
- #108518: Animation: Draw lock icon on baked curves
- #107937: Fix #107924: Scale limit respect negative values
- Hjalti wants this change badly.
- Sybren: it’s a math problem; if not all scale axes have the same sign there is no unique way to decompose a matrix into location/rotation/scale.
- Pierrick: the Copy Scale constraint has the same problem
- Hjalti: what if the scale range is -1 to 2?
- Pierrick: just tested, it acts as -2 to 2. Might be the biggest that wins, or just the positive side.
- Sybren: we could make an ‘Allow Flipping’ checkbox? That is disabled by default but enabled for older files by the versioning. Could be used for Copy Scale as well.
- Hjalti: likes that, it’s a practical solution.
- #108902: Fix #108527: Fixing Vertex Group operators to default back to Active Vertex Group
- For 3.6 or 4.0?
- Decision: 3.6
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-06-22T16:00:00Z. 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.