2024-01-04 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting was on 2024-01-04T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join on Jitsi (link below).

Present: Demeter Dzadik, Marion ‘EosFoxx’ Stalke, Bassam Kurdali, Gangernon, Jeremy Bot, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Pierrick Picaut, 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

  • Happy New Year!
  • Blender turned 30 last Tuesday! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3fdTIV85l98
  • This meeting we used Jitsi for the video call. It’s an experiment to see if we can stay there permanently. It offers some extra features that Google Meet doesn’t have:
    • Individual (so per person) volume sliders, so anybody can tweak how loud they hear someone.
    • Open for anyone to join (Google Meet requires approval when joining with a non-blender.org account).
    • People joining later can still see the entire chat history.
    • Decision: At the end of the meeting, everybody liked the experience.
  • New location for weekly developer reports.

Landed

Names are from the Git log.

Note that some commits were marked with Committer: Gitea <[email protected]>. These weren’t picked up by Sybren’s script for automatically getting those commits, and thus in the past there might have been commits missing from the meeting notes.

Short-term goals / Ongoing Work

  • Bone Collections:
    • Support for hierarchical bone collections has landed.
    • Demeter will create a TO DO task with some should-be-simple-to-implement feedback: #116795: Nested Bone Collections 4.1 Notes
    • We should go over some of the operator code to see if we (accidentally) are using the multi-object editing support incorrectly (like fixed by Pratik Borkade)
    • Also to do: outliner support.
    • Pierrick: You can toggle selectability of objects and scene collection. Is that something doable for bones?
      • Sybren: is in the plans, but for later.
      • Pierrick: in RigUI it was locking animation channels to prevent bones getting animated. Might be nice to have native too.
  • #105574: UI: Red Auto Keying Button
    • Needs feedback on specific shade of red
    • Nathan, being red/green colourblind, likes the 2nd from the right the best, as it’s the most obvious. The one on the left is rather dark, it’s not obvious that it’s red.
    • Bassam: 2nd and 3rd look faded, as if disabled. The last two burn his eyes, contrast is too high. Having a thin white line around it might help, especially if that stays white in the “off” state to indicate it’s still clickable.
    • Demeter: For my blurry eyes, 4th one is least unpleasant.
    • Sybren: it should be obvious, but not eye-burning, to be friendly for animators working with this on permanently.
    • Marion: likes the white outline idea.
    • Sybren: will ask why the white outline disappeared, to see if we can get it back. Update: no, that won’t work in Blender as it is now.
  • #115798: Anim: Add hotkey for keying set operators
    • Sybren: The reviewer seems unresponsive (which in itself is just a fact of life, this happens), should we have a policy for this? Like removing them as reviewer after a week of silence or so?
    • Nathan: instead of removing, we can just add more reviewers in that case. Makes it easier to do.
    • Nate: maybe some exponential back-off? Like if they were responsive in the first week, give them some more time for the next response.
    • Nathan: of course the time pressure on the PR also plays a role.
    • Sybren: these are all good ideas, no need to be more specific/rule-like than that.
  • #116382: WIP: Fix #115978: FCurve extrapolation ignored in NLA.
    • Still WIP? The build was failing.
    • Nate will remove the ‘WIP’ prefix & investigate the build.
  • Marion: what’s going on with the layered animation system?
    • Sybren: finishing up the hierarhical bone collections first, then we continue with that.
    • Next plan is to design a user interface. Nathan has been working on this already.
    • Marion offers to help with designs.

Patch Review & Decision Time

  • #108538: quaternion rotation values changing to inverse of what’s needed when rotating beyond limits of current quaternion segment
    • Nathan: we should try to set keys that set the shortest path, to reduce the need to flip quaternions manually. In the future we may want to even make Blender always follow the shortest path when interpolating.
    • Nathan: it’s not clear whether the proposal (flipping based on the rotation taken while transforming) is actually going to solve the confusion without introducing another one.
    • Bassam: it’s dangerous when Blender automatically does something, but then does the wrong thing. That’ll be more confusing.
    • Nathan: Out of Maya, XSI, and Blender, only Blender has reasonable quaternion support.
    • Sybren will close the issue, and link to Quaternion Interpolation

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-01-11T17:00:00Z. 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.

6 Likes