2024-06-06 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2024-06-06T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: David W, Demeter Dzadik, Gangernon, Iliya Katushenock, Ivan Cappiello, Nacho de Andrés, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Raymond Luc, 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

  • Blender 4.2 is now in beta (BCON3), so fixes go to the stabilizing branch. The main branch is 4.3-alpha now.
  • Code Quality project will start soon, Weak Areas of the Animation System is on the radar as well.

Landed

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

Blender

Add-ons

Technical Documentation

Ongoing Work

  • High Prio bugs:
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Mostly working on Baklava, will show demo if the buildbot is fast enough.
      • #122672: WIP: show Bindings in the Action editor
      • #122500: WIP: ‘binding’ selector in the UI
        • Sybren: tricky because id.animation_data can be None, and so the id.animation_data.action property may not exist at all.
        • Nathan: maybe move just the Action to the ID directly? Then that problem goes away.
        • Nacho: check the add-on ‘Action Commander’, he uses it a lot. Makes it easy to swap between lots of Actions, because you can add them to a per-object list.
        • Nacho: the width of the Actions drop-down is often a problem, especially when, for game animation, you have to work with around 300 Actions in the same file. David agrees.
        • Sybren: this ‘association’ that this add-on makes, between Actions and the objects they animate, is certainly desired, and is what the ‘Stash to NLA’ also tries to do.
    • Poked UI module again about #120412: Adjusting hotkey behavior for bone (de)selection
    • Action to Scene Range extension
      • Nacho: Action Commander also does this.
    • Wants to discuss the Bone Selection Sets add-on. Move to extensions platform, or become always-enabled core functionality?
      • Nacho: no detriment when always enabled. Depends on how much you animate with armatures.
      • Raymond: When I worked at titmouse and I showed it to the anim director he asked why it wasnt enabled by default haha
      • Nacho: uses bone collections as selection sets, instead of the Bone Selection Sets add-on.
      • Ivan: To me is not a problem to have it in extensions. And agree with Nacho.
      • Sybren: how about when we have the minimap/bonepicker?
      • Raymond: I personally use selection sets more than pickers, even when working in maya. The perk with selection sets for our studio is the shift alt W hotkey to easily access them, for bone collections its less optimized in that regards and theres often more bone collections than there are selection sets.
      • Nathan: Selection sets can be moved around between rigs, between blend files. They are in the animator’s control, whereas bone collections are more controlled by the rigger.
      • Nathan: let’s make them enabled by default, until we have something that can truly replace them. Raymond and Sybren agree.
      • Decision: move the add-on to the ‘core add-ons’ of Blender. Sybren will look at the practical side of this.
    • Had a call with Jeremy Schaefer (Dreamworks) about his upcoming seris The Box Assassin.
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Sybren, Rik Schutte, and Hjalti Hjálmarsson:
    • Sybren showed his progress with the Action selector in the Camera properties panel, and the display of Bindings in the Action editor.
    • Discussion about “where do keys go when there is no Action yet”. The outcome:
      • By default keys for Object and its Object Data will go to the same Action (so if either already has an Action, if the other gets keyed too, it just links to the same Action and adds a new Binding).
      • When Object Data is shared among other Objects, this has to be fleshed out still.
      • There might be an “active Action” set at the Scene level – if that is set, all new animation will go there.
      • Ivan: Pleaaaaseee do it! We constany use camera rigs addon for that and also because cameras are basically objects and objects are second class citizens in animation currently

Floating point precision issues

Iliya: wants to know what to do with incoming reports about floating point limitations.

Nathan: points out Moving transforms and matrices to double precision - #4 by Cessen

Unfortunately the meeting is running out of time, so the discussion will be moved to Blender Chat.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2024-06-13T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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