The meeting will be on 2024-04-04T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).
Present: Bassam Kurdali, Christoph Lendenfeld, David W, Eduardo Rubio, Demeter Dzadik, Falk David, Nacho de Andrés, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, 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 4.1.1 corrective release is coming.
- Unless a showstopper pops up, it’s now planned for 16 April.
- Commit fixes to
main, and add to #119631: 4.1: Candidates for corrective releases for cherry-picking by the release team (Philipp & Thomas). - If fixing in
mainand cherry-picking will be hard, then discuss with the release team and commit directly to the release brnach. Always mention it in the tracking issue. - Do not merge the release branch to
main.
Landed
Names are from the Git log. This list is limited to functional improvements & bugfixes.
Blender
- 8a1c2b172ae: Fix: Escape property name when keying (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-04-02)
- ed2408400d5: Fix #117927: Limit rotation constraint flipping (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-04-04)
Ongoing Work
- High Prio bugs: None!
- Christoph:
- Christoph’s weekly report
- #119914: Fix #119909: Unkeyable custom properties receive keyframes (for 4.1.1)
- #120176: WIP: Anim: Per bone wire width for custom shapes
- #119497: Anim: thread remake_graph_transdata
- #119388: Anim: run bezier handle calculation in parallel
- #119201: Anim: Detailed report if no keyframes have been inserted
- Nathan:
- Nathan’s weekly report
- Mainly just getting back up to speed with things after returning from vacation, and figuring out what to dive into next. Really exciting to see all the progress that happened while I was gone!
- Sybren:
- Sybren’s weekly report
- Filed bug report: #120140: RNA: path_resolve() doesn’t deal with single-quoted keys
- Worked on Copy Global Transform add-on, to add some “relative to the camera” workflows. See below.
- Nacho: check if key is actually necessary (big enough delta), and work only with preselected bones.
- Nacho: regenerating the entire Action by copy + adding new keys.
- Nacho: the tool could also insert keys for stepped animation, so that the ‘Stepped’ F-Curve modifier is no longer necessary.
- Sybren wants to add another key type (like “extreme”, “jitter”, those types), called “automation”, specifically for keys that have been created by some automated tool. They are meant to indicate “not created by an animator, so can be deleted and re-created”.
- Nate: maybe name them “Generated”?
- David W: box instead of diamond? Sybren: the shape is determined by the handle type, so cannot be used to represent the key type.
- Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
- Sybren showed an extension to the Copy Global Transform add-on, which should make it easier to work with animating on 2s with camera animated at 1s.
- There was some discussion about how to work with such a tool:
- In the future: corrective curves in another animation layer.
- Now: maybe on a separate “offset” bone.
Patches: Review & Decision Time
- Nate: Anim: Update NLA “make single user” popup dialog.
- Sybren: given that it’s hard to recover from later, the scaryness of the popup makes sense.
Description of Animation Bindings
Discussion of Animation Bindings in the RNA API of #118677: Baklava: minimal data model:
Identifier for a set of channels in this Animation, that can be used by a data-block to specify what it gets animated by.
- Makes sense to Christoph & Nathan.
- Falk: Sounds fine to me. But so far only developers seem to be fine with it
- Falk: This is supposed to be technical documentation right? In which case I think it’s good enough. For the user manual, it might need a bit more polishing
- Bassam: the “can” in the sentence is confusing → “…that is used by a data-block…”
- Nacho: double passive, “it gets animated by” → “what animates it”
About the name “Bindings”:
- Nacho: how about “Collections” instead of “Bindings”?
- Nathan: “folders” vs “labels” in an email client. Collections are more like “folders”, whereas Bindings are more like “labels”.
- Sybren: we could call them “labels”?
- Nacho: “bindings” is fine for what you describe, as they bind objects to their animation.
- Sybren: let’s document things well first, with some nice graphs. Module agrees.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-04-11T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.