2023-07-27 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2023-07-27T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: Christoph Lendenfeld, Demeter Dzadik, Eduardo Rubio, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Ivan Cappiello, MohammadHossein Jamshidi

People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • Small change: bpy.app.handlers.frame_change_post is no longer guaranteed to be called when playback stops #109218.

Landed

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

  • #108941: Animation: Replacing bone layers + groups with bone collections
    • Christoph: change labels to make it clearer which color is what (‘edit bone color’ vs. ‘pose bone color’)
    • Sybren: versioning in two steps:
      1. Migrate colors from bone groups to bones
      2. Migrate both layers & groups to collections.
    • Demeter: Cleanup is necessary anyway, so good to save everything and let people decide what to keep / discard.
  • #105574: Evaluate Red Auto Keying Button
    • Just waiting for OK from UI module.
  • #110316: Animation: Default NLA duplucation hot keys to duplicate linked
    • Sybren accepted during the meeting.
  • Brad is working on a concretification of the October 2022 animation workshop results, turning them into concrete tasks to work on.
  • #109015: Animation: Move Snapping to Scene
    • Christoph: NLA, Graph Editor, and Dope Sheet all use the same snapping modes. In the future we can see those diverge though.
    • Nathan: let’s keep it simple for now, when we are in that future we’ll see what to do.
    • Sybren: this also gives animators time to give feedback, and we’ll have more info to base a decision on.
  • Christoph and Nate are going to look at landing Ares Devaux’s patches.

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #110135: Drivers: implement default fallback values for RNA path based variables.
    • Example use case: driver variable points to a custom property on the current scene. If that property doesn’t exist, currently the entire driver fails. In this proposal the driver author can specify a fallback value.
    • Demeter: good idea, can see potential uses for it. In production he’d prefer the error though.
    • Sybren: worth making the driver interface yet more complex?
    • Nathan: good point, makes things visually harder to see what’s going on.
    • Decision: it would be nice to see some alternative UI designs, and to have some concrete use cases listed in the PR description.
  • #43933: Graph Editor: (Auto-)Focusing Channels
    • 9 years old, time to do something with it.
    • Nathan boiled it down to auto-framing FCurves on selection, with horizontal & vertical being separate operators / options. Has been requested by animation studios as well.
    • Nathan: makes sense to add it to the list.
    • Christoph: shouldn’t be too hard to implement.
    • Sybren: the on-selection can make this tricky, also because of selection sync
    • Nate: would this be a preference?
    • Nathan: yes, should be able to turn this on/off.
  • #108518: Animation: Draw lock icon on baked curves
    • Harley Acheson proposed an alternative approach that may simplify things.
    • Question: what to do when the curve is baked? Then locking/unlocking doesn’t do anything.
    • Demeter: it would make sense to draw a hypothetical “this curve is baked” icon instead of the lock.
    • Christoph: for now, Harley’s suggestion makes sense, as it looks nicer and keeps the functionality as it is now. In the future we can probably get rid of baked curves anyway, as their purpose is unclear.

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-08-03T16:00:00Z. 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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