2023-09-19 Animation & Rigging off-schedule meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2023-09-19T10:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: Alexander Gavrilov, Demeter Dzadik, Fani-Eleni Pandi, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nathan Vegdahl, Pablo Fournier, Rik Schutte, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

Landed

Names are from the Git log.

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #111143: Graph Editor Handle Selection: change operator name with expanded functionality?
    • Currently called “Select Handles”.
    • Nathan: “Select Keyframe Parts”?
    • Sybren: “Select Key / Handles”? MHJ: +1
    • Nathan: let’s go for that, and have a clear description in the tooltip.
  • #69059: Graph Editor: Curve list background color
    • Sybren: only look at the bone color (originally: group color) aspect of this. The channel color changes are not being discussed here.
    • Demeter & Hjalti: proposal 1 is more consisten with other UI elements.
    • Nathan: simple rectangles is nicer.
    • Demeter: Salvador Garcia proposes having more color slots (not just ‘solid’, ‘selected’, ‘active’), so that the background color for the animation channels can be set separately. Demeter is more in favour of keeping things simple, though.
    • MohammadHossein: we could also change the text color. Sybren: too hard to alter theme colors and still have “selected”, “active”, etc. understandable.
    • Sybren: do we still need the option to disable the display of these bone colors?
    • Demeter, Hjalti: yes, it’s good to keep this optional. It’s quite personal whether you’d want this, as it’s also depending on screen size.
    • Nathan: maybe turn it on by default, then? Hjalti: yes.
    • MohammadHossein: maybe use a colored underline under the name?
    • Sybren: might need more vertical space.
    • Rik: could also interfere with the red “no longer valid” warning underline.
    • MohammadHossein: maybe outline then?
    • Nathan: would likely break the “visual rythm” too much, when scanning & trying to see the hierarchy.
    • Decision: going for proposal 1 (small colored rectangles), and the user preference will change from default-off to default-on.

Bone Collections

Sybren gave a demo of the current state of the bone collection system.

  • Shift+M (set armature layer visibility) in edit mode: is there still a desire for selecting bone collection visibility directly in the 3D View?
    • Demeter: maybe, but likely to be more usable when we have nested collections. Otherwise the list gets unwieldy.
    • Nathan: wasn’t aware of this hotkey at all.
    • Nathan: for such long lists, a search option would be necessary.
  • Alexander: important to have better view of which collections the current bone is member of. If the list is longer than fits in screen, it’s hard to get an overview. Maybe sort the assignment menu with the assigned ones first.
    • MohammadHossein: could be a filter option on the collection list as well.
    • Demeter: we could also have a flag for collections that indicate whether to have this collection in the 3D View popups at all. But nesting is better.
  • Rik: once we have nesting, what’s the difference between bone collections & regular collections?
    • Sybren: regular collections can only contain objects & other collections. And to have bones exposed as object will require a lot more work, which is not worth it right now.
    • Nathan: data-model wise, armature bones basically live at the same level as mesh vertices.
  • Alexander: for Rigify it’s a bit annoying that the collections are only available in the Armature properties panel, and not in the Bone properties panel.
    • Sybren: maybe have a 2nd bone collection UIlist there, that only shows the collections the bone is assigned to. That could also solve the problem mentioned earlier, of having a nice overview of which collections it contains.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2023-09-28T16:00:00Z. 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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