2025-01-14 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2025-01-14T11:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: Andrew Beers, Christoph Lendenfeld, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, Jorn Boven, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Pablo Fournier, Rik Schutte, Sybren Stüvel

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

Links

Opening

  • Please raise your hand when you don’t understand things for any reason. The purpose of these meetings is collaboration. It is absolutely fine to ask for explanations.
  • There are no recordings of the meeting. This way everybody is free to say or show anything they want.

Since the Last Meeting / Announcements

Landed

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

Blender

Technical Documentation

Ongoing Work

  • High Prio bugs: None!
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Differentiating Action assignment via GUI vs. Python (so Python can always auto-assign a slot until Blender 5.0, to remain backward-compatible in “assigning an Action means getting animated”).
      • Briefly discussed in #blender-coders. Sergey Sharybin was strongly against this.
    • Copy-pasting in the Action Editor, how should it work across slots?
      • Started with code cleanup to get understanding: #133005
      • Start of a design: Copy-Pasting Keyframes in Action Editor - HackMD
      • Currently Blender goes over all the visible F-Curves, and if their (data path, array index) matches copied keys, they get pasted onto that F-Curve.
      • Has some special rules for “1 curve copied, pasting to many” or “many curves copied, pasting to 1”.
      • … and more complexity that’s too long to write here.
      • This means each slot gets the pasted data, no control, so that’s bad.
      • How to do it goodly?
      • Nacho: needs to consider selected keys vs. selected channels in the list.
      • Nathan: there is a tension between precise control and convenience for common cases. 95% of the time I just want it to “do what I mean”.
      • Nathan: one common case, that copy-pasting keys shouldn’t have to handle: copying into the same channels, as “duplicate” already handles that. Copy-pasting could be exclusively for things that aren’t addressed by duplicating into the same channel.
      • Nacho: pasting/duplicating over a frame range would be great to have.
      • Christoph: agrees with Nathan. But also uses copy-pasting a lot to duplicate keys. Copy-paste can be handy to copy, go to next key, paste. Duplicate can be fidgetty to get right. Maybe we should have more snapping options for this, to more easily align keys with each other.
      • Nathan: agrees with Christoph. But also feels that duplicating keys should be a simple, smooth operation. If that is super simple, then the other copy-paste options can require “more ceremony”.
      • MohammadHossein: Shift+D is a more Suzane way of doing it
      • Nathan: this also is about channel selection vs. key selection. If selecting a key does not change the channel selection, then this creates ambiguity in where you want to paste to. Nacho: selecting keyframes automatically selects the channels.
      • Sybren: we need a workshop to talk about selections in the animation editor. We might be able to combine it with the work on the minimap.
      • Sybren: will take the feedback so far, and create a prototype for testing.
      • Nacho: we could make holding Ctrl+V show a pie menu, where you can choose more specific behaviours.
    • Sybren: how many use copy-pasting of keys?
      • Hjalti: it happens, not a lot.
      • Rik: mostly uses Shift+D + drag. Pablo too.
      • Pablo: copy-paste is mostly from one file to another.
      • Nacho: on the dope sheet, yes. But not on the graph editor.
      • Nacho: uses duplicating mostly to then scale backwards, to get the opposite animation, as a starting point.
    • Sybren: how about copying between different properties, like location to scale?
      • Rik: some animators use that to copy jaw motion to stretch & squash.
      • Nacho: sometimes used to create keys with the right timing, to then change the values.

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on Tuesday 2025-01-23T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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