2024-01-09 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting was on 2025-01-09T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: Andrew “Andy” Beers, Andrew “Drew” Medina, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, David Woolf, Dorothee Dittrich Jonas Holzman, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

Opening

  • Please raise your hand when you don’t understand things for any reason. The purpose of these meetings is collaboration. It is absolutely fine to ask for explanations.
  • There are no recordings of the meeting. This way everybody is free to say or show anything they want.

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

New Faces

  • Andy: wants to help with C++. Has 10y experience in webdev, last 2y in the OpenUSD group as contributor. Wants to get job in this field, so wants to understand more & hang out with as many modules as possible to get a sense of what to focus on.
  • Jonas: Volunteer Blender Developer & Blender’s macOS Platform Maintainer. Software Developer at Autour de Minuit / ADV Studios.

Landed

Names are from the Git log. This list is limited to functional improvements & bugfixes.

Blender

Technical Documentation

Ongoing Work

Patches: Review & Decision Time

Jonas: #131810: UI: Transparent Armature Bone Selection

  • This PR makes the bones wireframe, removes the transparent faces. This makes them selectable by their wire (because of OpenGL selection).
  • How to display this in the viewport? As a separate option? Or as the default behaviour when the Armature is in Display: Wireframe mode?
  • Nathan: the current way in “wireframe” mode is functionally useless. Jonas & Brad agree. Let’s get rid of that entirely.
  • Nathan: the proposed approach is inconsistent with the way meshes are drawn. Not even sure if we should care about this. In mesh edit mode, wireframe has semi-transparent faces; in object mode meshes are drawn as true wireframe.
  • Sybren: seeing the (lack of) faces is important in mesh edit mode. For armatures, you’re not editing faces anyway.
  • Jonas: there are so many “wireframe” modes that they get confusing, so might be better to remove shading options rather than adding one more.
  • Sybren: likes the look of the semi-transparent faces, but understands that this impacts selection as well. Nathan thinks they’re pretty too.
  • Sybren: can we draw the semi-transparent faces, but skip them for selection? Jonas: not now, would be a big refactor.
  • Related: #131032: UI: Viewport X-Ray modes disambiguation
  • Jonas: We need a proper design for the whole X-Ray shading in Blender. Armature “X-Ray” mode is not even true X-Ray (in the sense of seeing through things), but is just “draw in front”.
  • Jonas has a wish for the alt-click menu to highlight bones when you hover over the bone name list. Nacho: people also have the opposite wish, where you can see the name of what you are about to select.
  • Nathan: a version of alt-select that doesn’t show the menu would be nice too, so that the menu itself doesn’t cover the bones you want to select from. Maybe more like a slider that highlights the bones one by one would be good? Thumbs up from Christoph.
  • Sybren: even with my limited rigging experience, I’ve cursed at how hard it is to select overlapping bones. Thank you for making this PR.
  • Jonas will also discuss his PR with the UI module. His plan is to hopefully get the PR landed in the current state, before moving to a full blown redesign of the selection / shading approach.

Sharing Interesting Stuff

Brad shares #132406: WIP: FBX import via ufbx

  • Might need Animation & Rigging module eyes on it, to help with animation import/export into slotted Actions.

Sybren shares the work Julien Duroure did for supprting slotted Actions in glTF: #132771: glTF: Manage slotted Actions

Brad: Mindbender Studio are working on a bigger game project with Blender. Brad is helping them out.

Brad: Duncan Rudd is sharing more procedural rigging/modeling stuff via geometry nodes: YouTube.

Drew: he and some friends are doing daily Blender challenges via his YouTube Channel’s Shorts.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Tuesday 2025-01-14T11:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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