2024-07-04 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
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The meeting will be on 2024-07-04T16:00:00Z. 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: Cigitia, David W, Luciano Muñoz, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Sybren Stüvel

Links

New face: Cigitia

  • Does programming as a profession and rigging as a hobby, interested in getting into animation.
  • Interested in developing on Blender to reduce its paper cuts.

Landed

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

*Note: the add-ons section has been removed from this list, as those are now either tracked as ‘core add-ons’ (and thus part of Blender), or as extensions (and thus too external to track here).

Blender

Ongoing Work

  • High Prio bugs:
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
    • Nathan’s weekly report
    • A good bit of bug fix work this week.
    • Otherwise, still working on the last bits of Baklava keyframing.
  • Sybren:
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
    • Discussed the new animation data model again, now in light of what the animators understand after the Binding ⇒ Slot renaming discussion we had previously.
    • Hjalti: how do I explain this to my nephew?
      • Nathan: if we do this right, you should only need to explain the parts that he actually needs to use, not the whole system, and then he can progressively learn more as needed. E.g. if he’s just inserting and editing keys, then just like now he shouldn’t even need to know actions exist at all yet.
    • Hjalti: with the new system, how do we version our animations?
      • Nathan: worst case, you can just ignore slots and keep doing things the way you currently do (different action for each object, and duplicate the actions for each new version).
      • Nathan: with phase 1 you can also optionally put more than one datablock’s animation in the same action, and then duplicate that action.
        • Hjalti: if more than one object is hooked up to the action, then will duplicating it also swap it out on all the objects that use it?
        • Nathan: for consistency with other parts of Blender, probably(?) not by default. But we can at least have an operator that does do duplication that way.
      • Nathan: in the future we also want to add a feature to explicitly address the versioning use case.
      • Hjalti: note that even when animating tightly related objects, we sometimes want to version their animation separately.
    • Hjalti: one of the biggest selling points for us of the new data model is the promise of being able to handle animation constraints in the Action, so they always come along with the animation. What are the plans for that? How will it work?
      • Nathan: we have several different ideas for this, but we don’t have a solid design yet. It’s also likely to be one of the most challenging features to implement, so it may come later on in development. Would love ideas for how you want it to work from a user perspective, to help inform the technical solutions we explore.
    • Hjalti: we need a chance to properly test the phase-1 system in non-trivial projects before it’s taken out of experimental and gets “locked in”.

Filtering

  • Luciano: Filter by “type” filters by data type, not by object type. You turn off “by camera” because you want to focus on characters, so it should also disable camera objects.

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Thursday 2024-07-11T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

8 Likes
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Versioning by layer would be much more convenient than versioning by action when you want to do it separately for each object. But good UX will be needed so that its workable. Like collapsable layer groups, so that you can group all “Camera” version layers together.

2 Likes
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Versioning by layer would be much more convenient than versioning by action

That’s the intended workflow. But multi-slot Actions are going to exist way before multi-layered Actions, and so for now we’ll have to make the single-layer/multi-slot case work as well.

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Hello!

I do mainly previz and layout work and spend most of the time in Dopesheet. I rely on Blend tools a lot for posing. But since Blend Tools are for Graph Editor only, I stiil need to keep afloat AnimAide addon, that work both in Dopesheet, Graph Editor and Viewport. Dopesheet is much cleaner for previz work: fcurves add extra visual noise.

Any chances to see Blend Tools working in Dopesheet and Viewport, not only Graph Editor?

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It’s on our radar. No promises as to when it’ll happen though.

1 Like