2023-12-21 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2023-12-21T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Google Meet (link below)._
Present: Bassam Kurdali, Christoph Lendenfeld, Daiki Hishimoto, Jason Schleifer, 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

  • This is the last meeting of the year!
  • The next meeting (January 2024) will use a different meeting URL: https://beeldbellen.vc4all.nl/blender-animrig
    • That’ll be using Jitsi, which gives everybody more control over the meeting (like a personal volume slider per attendee). Also it’s Open Source.
    • The server is hosted in NL and adheres to NL privacy laws.
    • For now this is experimental. Smaller-scale tests have shown it was fine, but we still have to test with a crowded module meeting with people spread across the globe.
  • Technical documentation will move: A New Developer Documentation Platform — Developer Blog
    • Jason also uses this at Griptape. Has his “Easy to use” stamp of approval.

Landed

Names are from the Git log.

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #116138: Hidden Bones cant be active (thus cant be accessed in Outliner)
    • Philipp Oeser wrote in the chat: Is there a reason why we dont allow hidden bones to be active? (It is prevented from the Outliner, also check ED_armature_edit_validate_active). This is not in line with other things in blender (hidden stuff can still be active, just not selected…). As a consequence, we have reports like #116138: Hidden Bones in Property.
    • Most likely a misunderstanding of the UI guidelines / rules.
    • Daiki is interested in fixing this.
    • Bassam: the report should be updated to say “active bones” instead of “selected bones”.
  • Unexpected behavior with transform modes after the snapping system has moved to the scene. #116367: Regression: Snapping no longer works with scaling in graph editor
    • 3D Viewport snapping option called “Affect” (with move/rotate/scale toggles) now also influences the animation editors.
    • Christoph: do we add a separate option for this for the animation editors? It’s now confusing that the 3D Viewport option affects this.
    • Bassam: in favour of another “copy” of that option for the animation editors.
    • Jason agrees neck-hurts-from-nodding-yes-much.
    • Bassam: is the snapping the same for the driver editor? Because there different snapping options might make sense. As a user it doesn’t matter much, but as a teacher this is an issue, as students are already overwhelmed when they learn about drivers. Anything extra on top of that is likely too much.
    • Christoph: yeah, it’s the same, as it’s just the graph editor.
    • Sybren: how often do you use the graph editor part of the drivers?
    • Bassam & Jason: not often, but can be useful for linear mappings.
    • Decision: add another copy of that setting for the animation editors, so they have their own setting.
  • #116163: Anim: Add falloff shape property to Weight Paint context menu
    • Bassam: it makes sense
    • Bassam of the 4 options, the 3rd makes most sense. The checkboxes are too unrelated to each other to be on the same line, and the 3rd option has the nicest spacing.
    • Rest of the module agrees, although there are no strong opinions.

Help Needed

  • Design issue: UIList (for flat list of bone collections in Blender 4.0) has a user-manageable vertical size + scroll bar. TreeView (for hierarchy of bone collections in Blender 4.1) does not, and always expands to show the full tree.
    • Module sees the point.
    • Bassam: can it be fixed just for this case? Or would it have to be in general for the tree view?
    • Sybren: Also: the UIList has Ctrl+F for filtering/searching, and the tree doesn’t have this. That might be implementable on “our side” though.
    • Felipe: could we go half way? It could be enough to expand the tree view when you open a list, but not contract it when closing.
    • Nate: doesn’t seem like a showstopper, so let’s just land this and deal with it later when people can actually play with it and get experience.
    • Jason: if the reason you want to scroll is to reach the buttons on the side, can’t we just add those as options in a context menu?
    • Sybren: yeah, we should (note: and by the time this notes are published, this is already in main)
  • #79670: Baking animation of bones affected by a curve (spline IK) is wrong
    • Sybren: if we know that certain options of the Spline IK will cause problems with baking, we may want to display a warning.
    • Nate: the issue is 3 years old, not that high prio.
    • Decision: this is something to solve in a new baking system (which we were planning to build some time anyway).

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-01-04T17:00:00Z. Note that it will use a different meeting URL (https://beeldbellen.vc4all.nl/blender-animrig), so be sure to update your bookmarks.

Again the meeting 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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