2024-06-13 Animation & Rigging module meeting

[Cessen]

The meeting will be on 2024-06-13T16:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

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

Present: Bassam Kurdali, Christoph Lendenfeld, David W Ivan Cappiello, Jeremy Bot, Nate Rupsis, Nathan Vegdahl, Raymond Luc, Sybren Stüvel, WilsonVilla

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 Conference 2024
  • Ticket sales started!
  • Sybren sent in presentation proposal for the module, about our general progress & Project Baklava.
  • May need an estimate of how much baklava to order at the Turkish bakery.

Landed

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

Blender

• a36599b3236: Anim: implement 3D viewport keyframing functionality for layered actions (Nathan Vegdahl) (2024-06-07)
• 119f764eb9f: Fix: Child Of constraint broken after removing target (Nathan Vegdahl) (2024-06-10)
• 3f0114730d0: Anim: UI: Action selector now always lists layered Actions (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-10)
• 3089ac97b1c: Anim: add new keytype ‘generated’ styling to the Sequencer theme (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-10)
• 3c01ff08241: Anim: Bump subversion to 1 for ‘generated’ keytype theme versioning (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-10)
• 69e520627f3: Anim: reset idroot when adding a layer or binding to an Action (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-10)
• 8c74056921f: Anim: RNA: set Binding.name_display as the ‘name property’ (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-10)
• 83311ef96de: Fix #122777: The keyframe_insert method throws python exceptions (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-11)
• 9c77598905f: Fix: Remove redundant wording in parameter label (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-06-11)
• 973d33a2785: Fix: Wire Width for bones not copied (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-06-11)
• 1a4f0848069: Refactor: combine insert_keyframe() and insert_key_rna() into a single function (Nathan Vegdahl) (2024-06-11)
• 6ac8f8efadf: Anim: use keyframing user preferences for layered action keying (Nathan Vegdahl) (2024-06-11)
• 0250844dae9: Anim: RNA: make ‘name’ the ‘name property’ of Action Bindings again (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-13)
• 9dcc63b76cc: Fix #122372: Keyingsets not keying custom properties of type EnumProperty (Christoph Lendenfeld) (2024-06-13)
• 10c4d71fbed: Fix #123107: Memory leak when deleting edit bones (Sybren A. Stüvel) (2024-06-13)

Ongoing Work

• High Prio bugs:
  • #123105: Regression: Rigify rigs IK Heel are broken if opened in Blender 4.2 (see below)
• Christoph:
  • Christoph’s weekly report
  • #121523: WIP: Anim: Eyedropper for bone properties: land with limited functionality?
  • Bug Fix focus.
• Nathan:
  • Nathan’s weekly report
  • The main Baklava keyframing PRs have landed, and keyframing mostly works! Now working on finding and addressing the misc bits that still don’t work.
  • #123105: Regression: Rigify rigs IK Heel are broken if opened in Blender 4.2
    • Rigify was relying on previously broken behavior, which was fixed in blender. However, it is nevertheless a backwards compatibilty concern. What should we do about it?
    • Nathan: we could potentially address this via versioning, to update the constraints in old files with the equivalent min/max values.
    • The module is in favor of that solution.
    • Christoph: it won’t be exactly the same behavior. It used to snap to one end of the range limit, but won’t anymore.
    • Nathan: that’s okay, because that’s the buggy behavior that was fixed.
    • Ivan: note that Rigify will also need to be fixed, so that newly generated rigs aren’t broken too.
    • Nathan: good point, we’ll need to do both at the same time.
    • Module agrees with that plan.
• Sybren:
  • Sybren’s weekly report
  • Created Animation & Rigging Module Focus Planning.
  • Poked UI module again about #120412: Adjusting hotkey behavior for bone (de)selection, it’ll be discussed in their module meeting.
  • Working on Baklava:
    • #123187: Anim: add ID* cache of users to Action Bindings
    • #122672: WIP: show Bindings in the Action editor
    • #122500: WIP: Action + Binding selector in Camera Properties panel
• Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
  • Skipped as Rik and Pablo are at Annecy, and time was better spent continuing coding.

Patches: Review & Decision Time

• #122812: options “play in …” of the timeline does not seem to work This report is a misunderstanding of undocumented and a bit weird behavior. Those settings only work if not started from the Graph Editor, Dope Sheet or NLA editor. This was an intentional change based on feedback from Hjalti.
  • Nate: is the motivation playback performance?
  • Raymond: I’ve used this before to make editing in the graph editor faster, when e.g. the scene has a really heavy rig. Makes the graph editor responsive.
  • Christoph: makes sense. Although this issue is specifically about playback. Do you use the feature for playback?
  • Raymond: no, only for editing interaction.
  • Bassam: let’s check with Hjalti about the original intent, to make sure we understand the use case for the current behavior.
  • Christoph: yeah, definitely let’s check with him.
  • Nathan: agreed. Having said that, it sounds like it might just not be useful for playback anymore, and we could change it to only be about editing interactivity. But yeah, let’s talk to Hjalti first to confirm the intended use case.
  • Module agrees.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Tuesday 2024-06-18T10:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.