2024-04-25 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2024-04-25T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: Andy Goralczyk, Bassam Kurdali, Brad Clark, Christoph Lendenfeld, David W, Eduardo Rubio, 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

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

Landed

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

Blender

Add-ons

Technical Documentation

User Manual

Ongoing Work

Patches: Review & Decision Time

  • #120815: Anim: Adding bone length property into Bone Properties Panel
    • Nate: there is a discrepancy in how the Head/Tail section labels are used. Probably good idea to check the UI guidelines to see which ones is consistent with that, and clean up the UI.
    • Nathan: better to land this PR first, because it’s someone else’s.
    • Bassam: there’s more “computed” properties, like Object Dimensions, that do not show up in the Properties panel. This doesn’t have to block this PR though.
    • Nathan: maybe there is a rule that the Properties panel is for only data-properties (and not computed/derived ones)?
    • Decision: module agrees it’s a good idea, and Nathan will check with the UI module.

Picking Bones for Constraints

  • Andy sometimes needs to constrain lights to the bones of linked (but not overridden) armatures. Because the armature is linked, he can’t go into edit or pose mode to select the bones and see/copy their names. This makes the workflow for creating these constraints pretty obnoxious.
  • An eyedrop picker to select the target bone for a constraint would make this easier.

Two questions by Andy:

  1. Can we get an actual picker for bones?
  2. Would this be usable in Object mode as well?
  • Bassam: I would love this, from a user perspective (I have a very similar lighting workflow)
  • Sybren: good idea, let’s do this. Also I don’t see an issue having this in Object mode.
  • Andy: maybe could be expanded to selecting vertex groups of a mesh as well, but maybe as a separate PR?
  • Sybren: important to keep the ability to type the bone name.
  • Sybren: can work on it.
  • Christoph: can also work on it.
  • Sybren: what might be tricky is to get it as one bone picker, that sets both the armature and the bone fields.
  • Andy: for me it would be a good compromise to pick the Armature first, then pick the bone.
  • Bassam: you can select bones in the outliner in object mode, so maybe it makes sense to be able to pick them?
  • Sybren: can imagine that it can be advantageous as well, to pick an Armature first, and then the Bone picker only chooses bones from that Armature.
  • Christoph: as long as we don’t call it “bone picker” in the release notes. That would get animators too excited.
  • Sybren: “bone eyedropper” would be better, yeah.

Big Blue Button?

  • Sybren: Is it working well? Pros? Cons?
  • Christoph: likes it, but audio delay is annoying. Nathan agrees, more of a delay than with Google Meet.
  • Bassam & Nathan: the 1h time limit is a bit annoying.
  • Nate & Christoph: preserved chat history is a huge plus
  • Nate: would be curious about the shared notes. Maybe add the agenda?
  • Brad: Google was easier but it doesn’t make much difference to me
  • Sybren: I don’t see strong motivation to move away, so let’s stay here for now, as it’s Open Source and nice enough.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-05-02T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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