2023-08-15 Animation & Rigging off-schedule module meeting

The meeting will be on 2023-08-15T10:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: Alexander Gavrilov, Christoph Lendenfeld, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nathan Vegdahl, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

  • Christoph is going to add another day for Blender. He’ll be working Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday.
  • Sybren, Nate Rupsis, and Jason Schleifer returned from SIGGRAPH.

Landed

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • How to move forward with the off-schedule meetings?
    • MHJ and Alexander are fine with both slots.
    • Nathan: idea was also to get the Blender Studio animators in, currently hasn’t happened yet but is something to consider.
    • Christoph: also have them talk about things that are annoying in the day-to-day work. During production this could be used to create some immediate relief.
    • Conclusion: going to accept that they can become shorter than the usual ones, and to try and get studio animators in there every once in a while.
  • #110758: Bendy Bones: implement a new curve-aware vertex to segment mapping mode.
    • Nathan has concerns about continuity of deformations, will make a concrete example.
    • Alexander is going to include the images in the patch description to make it clearer what’s the “before” and “after”.
  • #110135: Drivers: implement fallback values for RNA path based variables.
    • Looking good, Nathan will do another review pass.
  • #105373: Mitigate the risk of wrong shape key selection in sculpt and edit mode.
    • Sybren: is there a list of operators to work through?
    • Alexander will make a best-effort list. Once those are checked off as ‘doing the right thing’ the PR can land.
  • Christoph: there seems to be a selection issue in the dopesheet.
    • Click to select a key does not select the channel, but drag-select does. Should we alter this behaviour and make it consistent?
    • Sybren: a little bit afraid of the consequences given the list of selection synchronisation issues.
    • Nathan & Sybren: consistency is good.
    • Pratik Borhade offered to make a patch. Module approves.
    • Christoph will make a video & bring it up in the next meeting to discuss further.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-08-24T16:00:00Z. 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.

4 Likes

I’m one of those who uses Face Maps and will be glad if they’re back.

They have big potential, but first I’d make Face Maps, Face Sets and Face Groups in Geometry Nodes one thing. Update face maps in real-time by drawing in sculpt mode same way you can “draw” vertex groups in Weight Paint mode. I know this module mostly concentrates on character animation, but feature like that would elevate motion graphics in Blender to another level. We’ve been talking about that at Blenderartists and it’s highly anticipated feature that devs don’t like too much.

My humble suggestion will be to create one panel in the data properties called Domain Groups, which will list all vertex groups, face maps (and edge groups and face corner groups if they become a thing, could be useful for geometry nodes), with the ability to filter by type. This way UI is cleaner (weights can only appear on vertex groups), and the purpose becomes clearer for Face Maps.