2024-08-08 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2024-08-08T16:00:00Z. 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, Demeter Dzadik, Jeremy Bot, Nathan Vegdahl

Links

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

Landed

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

Blender

Ongoing Work

  • High Prio bugs:
    • None
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
    • Nathan’s weekly report
    • Still working on channel groups for layered actions: https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/125774
      • Coming along slowly but surely. The channel groups now get created and deleted properly, and are displayed in the channel box. I’m currently tracking down a bug where keyframe selection doesn’t work on the channel group row itself. I’m spinning my wheels a bit on that, so I think I might move on and get the rest of it working first, and then come back to this bug.
  • Sybren:
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Hjalti Hjálmarsson:
    • Missing tools in armatures:
      • Hjalti: in object mode, if you select an object and press shift-g, it brings up a menu with lots of useful operations for selection (e.g. select children, select immediate children, etc.). Bones have a similar menu, but it’s missing most of those useful operations. Can we add those operations, please?
      • Nathan: I suspect those will be pretty straightforward to add. Good idea.
    • Channel group design:
      • Nathan: right now we’re just reimplementing channel groups as-is, but in the future we’ll want to revisit their design. In practice, I suspect almost nobody manually reorganizes how channels are grouped in the current system, even though it’s possible to do so. Is that the case for you?
      • Hjalti: yeah, I never do that. Additionally, there are weird consequences of how the current system works. For example: if a rigger changes the name of a bone, and thus the channels for that bone break in the animation file, you have to manually edit the path of every channel for that bone. Whereas what I’d expect is that I could just edit the channel group of the bone and that would fix it for all the bone’s channels. The fact that the channel groups are this arbitrary separate thing that just happen to look like the bone, rather than actually being a representation of the bone, is weird.

Octohedral Bone Width Display

Christoph started a thread on Blender.chat discussing an RCS feature request to be able to adjust bone width in octohedral display mode

  • Nathan: I think the gist behind the request is good, but I’m skeptical of implementing it as requested. For example, when rigging, I actually find that having to manually adjust the bone width in b-bone display mode gets in my way. So in a sense, I’ve had the opposite complaint for a long time: I want b-bones to do auto-width based on length, like octohedral currently does.
  • Nathan: a couple of ideas (not mutually exclusive):
    • Make b-bones indicate bone direction as well, limiting the need for octohedral display in the first place.
    • Turn whether bones do auto-width or not into an independent toggle that can be enabled/disabled in both octohedral and b-bone display mode.
  • Demeter: I like the toggle idea. Also, why not make the bone display type (octohedral, b-bone, etc.) per bone? I like how per-bone colors have worked out, and think that was the right decision, so it might be good for display mode as well.
  • Christoph: I’m happy I got so much feedback on the thread. I agree that we shouldn’t follow RCS blindly. Also, it’s weird that you can only see b-bone segments in b-bone mode. Also, we probably have too many bone display modes.
  • Bassam: maybe we should make a table of the different display modes and their use cases, to help ensure we don’t miss anything, and also to help figure out where the redundancies are. I’m happy to start this and post to the module chat.
  • Nathan: Bassam, that would be awesome. However, keep in mind that we don’t plan to work on this immediately. We have other higher priority things right now.
  • Christoph: still, starting on the design process would be great!
  • Demeter: I use b-bone mode and manage the widths like a madman. It has its upsides though, like when I build a layered cake out of bones, it’s very delicious.
  • Jeremy: I use the various bone draw types for different things, and use bone width to make things more visible to when rigging (e.g. when there’s overlapping bones).
  • Jeremy: it would be cool to store these attributes (bone color, width, etc.) in a consistent way. Having a uniform Python API for all of them, so that tools written for one attribute can be applied to any of those attributes, would be awesome. (Also probably nice for internal C++ code.)

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be an off-schedule meeting on Tuesday 2024-08-13T10:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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