The meeting will be on 2024-03-19T11:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).
Present: Christoph Lendenfeld, Eduardo Rubio, Hassan Charafeddine, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nacho de Andrés, Rik Schutte, Sybren Stüvel
People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.
Links
- Video Call. Note that there are no recordings of the meeting. This way everybody is free to say or show anything.
- A&R Module Meetings calendar for inclusion in your own calendar
- Previous & next meeting notes
- Issues & Pull Requests
- #animation-module chat channel
- Draft agenda for any upcoming meetings
Since the Last Meeting / Announcements
- Blender 4.1 release has been delayed by “a few days” to give devs some time to fix reported issues.
- New faces:
- Hassan, was on Blender Chat, here to listen in. Interested in Baklava & Rig on the Fly.
- Nacho, also on Blender Chat. Animator & Rigger, add-on programmer, RigUI & working on timelines tool with some people from Dreamworks & Disney. Wants to build “Animate Pro” to make things easier for Maya animators to transition, until Blender gets similar tools itself.
Landed
Names are from the Git log. This list is limited to functional improvements & bugfixes.
Blender
- 1e70c29320b: Fix: Slider not respecting bounds when snapping to increments (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-03-12)
- fc025abde66: Anim: Use Theme for Motion Path points (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-03-14)
- 30711d13981: Fix #119623: Anim: unintended API change in keyframe_insert() function (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-03-19)
- c0c7e34bab7: Fix #119615: Anim, Crash with NLA tweak mode and linked Armatures (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-03-19)
- 43e968dc7854: Fix #119612: Markers bar in NLA blocks view of final track in list (Pratik Borhade)
Add-ons
- 6404d1dc: Fix #105241 (Rigify): remove the deprecated keying flag. (Alexander Gavrilov) (2024-03-18)
Ongoing Work
- High Prio bugs:
- Christoph:
- Christoph’s weekly report
- Didn’t add reviewers yet, will do after 4.1 has been released.
- #119497: Anim: thread remake_graph_transdata
- #119388: Anim: run bezier handle calculation in parallel
- #117506: UI: Add separate option for line width in the viewport (lower priority)
- Nacho: related question, about gyzmos. Is it possible to have a way to have some lines thicker, but not all?
- Christoph: that’s what this PR is about, to add that option for custom bone shapes. Could even become a per-bone option.
- #119375: Anim: Add custom pre and post frame color to motion path
- For now it’s a setting on the motion path itself, as that’s where currently the custom color can be set (it’s just split up into pre/post colors).
- Future PR will move this to preferences, could then be used for GreasePencil and mesh onion skinning as well.
- and working on adding support for keyframe insertion to Baklava
- Sybren:
- Sybren’s weekly report
- Shows Baklava progress so far, with graph editor and dope sheet support.
Patches: Review & Decision Time
- #119300: Bone snapping to only bones
- Is there any use in snapping a bone (in pose mode) to anything that’s influenced by that bone? In other words, shall we make snapping of pose bones more predictable, by letting Blender ignore anything that needs updating when the bone moves? That would include the mesh it’s deforming, and things with constraints that (indirectly) use the bone somehow.
- Another issue: Copy Rotation on bone, but want to snap while translating.
- Eduardo: are you able to snap to bone rotations? Sybren: I don’t know, haven’t tried. Eduardo: would be nice to have.
- Sybren: how about a separate option to only snap to bones (and not mesh vertices)? Christoph, Eduardo, MohammadHossein like this a lot.
- Christoph: thinks a separate option would be best, also for managing expectations of what it would do.
- Eduardo: how would it work when a bone has a custom shape? Would it still allow snapping to head/tail/middle? Christoph tried, and it doesn’t snap to the custom shape.
- MohammadHossein: Does ‘Snap to Vertex’ still work when the mesh object is marked as non-selectable?
- Christoph: feature request: snap to object origins, could be very nice for moving bones to the origin of other objects.
Discussions
- Nacho: Some things difficult relating to context:
- like scaling the view of the graph editor from outside the graph editor.
- autokeying is hard to trigger from Python code.
- Sybren: we can discuss this certainly, to see which concrete issues we can solve from the Blender side.
- Nacho: feedback from animators:
- Expand/contract of bone ActionGroups is not as expected; on selection of bone, its group should automatically expand.
- Often heard request from animators: Isolating a curve on selection of a keyframe
- Sybren: we can work on this, especially if someone can make these desires more concrete, so that it’s super clear what has to happen from Blender’s side (like replace “isolate a curve” with “hide all other curves”, or “hide all curves that do not have any keys selected”)
Help Needed
- Video for the release notes about the keying changes/improvements.
- Rik: some of us could take up that task. Will discuss with Sybren & Fiona Cohen in the studio.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-03-28T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.