2023-12-07 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
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The meeting will be on 2023-12-07T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below).

Present: Christoph Lendenfeld, Daiki Hishimoto, Ingo Clemens, Nate Rupsis, 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

  • The Blender development process should be public and traceable.
  • Before the meeting Kevin Burke presented his ideas for a Character Selector aka Bone Picker. slides

Landed

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #113364: Indicate Parent Inverse Matrix State in UI
    • Sybren has doubts about the button next to the object parent.
    • Nate: should be its own item on its own line.
    • Christoph: how about exposing the matrix as a set of read-only fields, with a button to reset it? Like we do for transform, delta transform, etc.
    • Module agrees that that is a good place for it to live.
    • Sybren: decomposition might not work, due to shear, negative scale, etc. It would be nice to show as loc/rot/scale + maybe a warning “also includes sheer component”.
    • Nathan: it’s quite straightforward to find whether it’s decomposable or not.
    • Nate: most importantly it should show whether it exists (i.e. is non-unit) or not.
    • Nathan is not convinced that shear is a thing in the parent inverse matrix. He tests, and it actually is a thing (when parenting a non-sheared object to a sheared one).
    • Sybren: then this PR can move to a “Parent Inverse” indicator on its own line & a “clear” button?
    • Module agrees.
  • #105574: UI: Red Auto Keying Button
    • Module still likes the idea, just waiting for the UI module.
  • Comment from
    Nathan Vasil on #105120: Animation: Remove collection hotkeys from pose mode about hotkeyability of bone collection visibility
    • Sybren: Should we work on this to make it easier to bind a hotkey to the visibility of a specific bone collection?
    • If so, how do we specify which one? By name? What if it gets renamed?
    • Worth the effort of designing? Or shall we ask Nathan Vasil to come up with a suitably detailed design for this?
    • Nathan: not sure that ‘hotkeys for layers’ is a good starting principle for such a design. Better to find the root of this first: which problem was solved to begin with, with these hotkeys?
    • Nate & Nathan: good idea to have Nathan Vasil investigate this further. We don’t have the time to do this right now.
  • To decide: move Copy Global Transform add-on into Blender itself?
    • Christoph: good idea to move into Blender itself, especially when it’s in C++ then other tools can reuse the underlying logic.
    • Module agrees.
    • Christoph: copy-pasting transforms from one object to another, in code, is a super useful tool. Other operations, like baking animation, boils down to the same thing.
    • Christoph’s prototype that would use this: #115675 - WIP: world space copy/paste prototype - blender - Blender Projects
  • Proposal from Pablo Fournier: “select same property” operation on graph editor.
    • Sybren: is this something we can easily give him? Sounds like a nice quality of life feature.
    • Nathan’s concerned this is potentially a rabbit hole. For a tool in core Blender this may need some more design thought.
    • Sybren: So build as add-on first? Nathan agrees.
    • Christoph: the search bar already helps here, the Dillon Goo Studio animators use that already to search for things like locx and press A to select all those channels. That might already be enough, and avoids the rabbit hole.
  • Keyframing workflow changes:
    • Sybren: what’s the feedback from community on #113504: Anim: Insert keyframes without keying sets?
    • Christoph: the change was requested by a bunch of animators. Others aren’t super happy with it, as they use this menu a lot for choosing what to key on a per-key basis.
    • Christoph made a PR with some alternatives, but the basic feedback was ‘we want the old behaviour back’.
    • That new PR: revert the change to the I keyframe, and have new behaviour on K. He’s also experimenting with the ‘pie menu on drag’ functionality in Blender.
    • Changes to keyframe insert hotkeys #115798: WIP: Anim: Add pie menu for adding keyframes
    • Christoph is working with the community to come up with alternatives.
    • Nate: let’s invite more people with opposing opinions!
    • Nathan: maybe for clearly-scoped projects like this: post test builds on Blender Artists? Definitely broadens our reach, but can also be very noisy.
    • Christoph: BA might be a good idea if we take a simple approach of posting a test build, then a week later see what was said.
    • Nate: maybe work with “partners”, like CG Cookie & others, to have further-reaching & community-focused people.
    • Sybren: most important to get more people in the module meetings.
    • Nathan: could be nice to post builds on BA and ask people to join the meetings for giving feedback.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 2023-12-12T11:00:00Z. 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.

9 Likes
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Kevin Burke’s Bone Picker mockup and ideas look amazing. It’s the missing piece in order to be able to work with Blender within large productions and using advanced rigs.

1 Like
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“select same property” operation on graph editor.

See this PR I started, specifically the Channel Type filter of it: #104758 - WIP: Animation: Select Grouped operator - blender - Blender Projects
It has since stalled, but it seems its functionality is still desired. So maybe it can be salvaged in some way.