2025-01-23 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting was on 2025-01-23T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: Andrew Beers, David Woolf, Drew Medina, Felipe G, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Nitin Rawat, Sybren Stüvel, Thomas Dinges

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.

Landed

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

Blender

Technical Documentation

User Manual

Ongoing Work

  • High Prio bugs:
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Fixed Copy Global Transform add-on for slotted Actions.
    • Added the removal of the “NLA strip up/down” operators (which used to be in the Action editor header) to #119626: Anim: breaking changes for Blender 5.0
      • Nathan: They were badly broken when I tested them (when moving from the Action Editor header into a menu). The fact that nobody reported anything about them is an indicator of how little they are used.
      • Module agrees to the removal.
      • Nacho: what about the “Push Down” and “Stash” buttons? They are now in the menu, right?
      • Sybren: they are, and I think they should stay until the NLA can be completely removed. Module agrees.
    • To decide for Blender 5.0: removal of pre-2.50 animation versioning code. Blender already does not bring in animation when linking animated objects into a scene. Opening such old blend files is still supported, though, and their animation will be converted to slotted Actions in Blender 4.4. Proposal: for Blender 4.5 to be the last release that does this versioning, and Blender 5.0 will simply ignore all animation data from 2.49b and older files.
      • Thomas: would be good to coordinate this between modules. There’s other modules that want to drop support for very old files as well. It would be good to coordinate this, so that there is one version of Blender that drops a bunch of old things all at once.
      • Sybren: Bastien Montagne mentioned that other modules had this wish as well. He didn’t specifically mention a version of Blender in which to do this, though.
      • Nathan: these files would be so old, they would go to 2nd or 3rd year in highschool right now.
      • Nacho: would be nice to give people a warning when they open such an old file, including which version of Blender to use that was still compatible.
      • Module agrees with removal. Sybren will coordinate with other modules.
    • #133497: WIP: Anim: refactor keyframe copy/paste code
      • Nacho: has a wish for operators that under water do the same thing, but in a different editor, would be unified into a single operator. That will make it easier to use them, instead of having to switch operators depending on the context.
      • Sybren: agrees, if they can check the editor and say it’s wrong, then they can also just call the right code.
      • Nacho: it’s simple things, like the “Play” button that’s different in each editor. It could even just be a function scene.play().
      • Sybren: will look at that for the copy/paste operators.
      • Felipe: it would also be nice if things were more exposed as functions / properties, instead of only being available as operators.
      • Sybren: agrees, operators aren’t really made for calling from Python, more for UI aspects (hotkeys, menus, buttons, etc.)
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
    • Pablo: Action Slot assignment bug upon opening a file.
    • Sybren: showing “copy-paste in Action Editor” design.
    • Rik: shapekeys improvements
      • Performance being discussed at 2025-01-14 Shapekeys Performance
      • Rik: wants hierarchical organisation of shapekeys
      • Sybren: wants to see shapekey blend value per object that uses it.
      • Rik: wants multi-selection & ‘copy to selected’ behaviour on the properties.
      • Nathan: wants multiple offsets in one shapekey (so a ‘shapekey’ for the slider at 25%, another one at 50%, another one at 75%, etc) to make non-linear motion easier.
    • Hjalti: weight painting is painful
      • Nathan: not all tools understand things like vertex group locking, or the weight normalisation.
      • Rik: this is one of the reasons studios avoid Blender, because it’s such a pain.
      • Sybren: there is no weight painting without pain.
      • Rik: EasyWeight add-on might be nice?
      • Nathan: Weight painting is a thing that we should redesign at some point.
      • Nacho (in module meeting): the biggest complaint he hears is the inconsistency of the mirroring options. Smooth Weights (YoubTube) builds a symmetry map, which is then used for subsequent operations. That works much more reliable than constructing symmetry info on the fly with just bone names. It’s a very powerful add-on.
      • Module agrees weight painting is wonky.

Patches: Review & Decision Time

  • #133135: select child works correctly in objects but not with bones
    • Currently only a single child is selected. Connected bones get priority.
    • Desire of reporter is to have all children selected, whether they’re connected or not.
    • Philipp Oeser proposes to make the operator select all visible children, and add an option ‘Only Connected’.
    • Sybren: suspects the current behaviour is for walking up/down the chain instead of broadening the selection.
    • Nacho: they even work only on the active bone, and not on all selected bones.
    • Nacho: another issue is that often control rigs use constraints to define relationships, and so for the user of that rig the parent/child relationships are different than from Blender’s perspective.
    • Nathan: likes Philipp’s proposal.
    • Sybren: how about un-selecting the parent (or not)?
    • Nacho: there is already the ‘Extend’ option for this. It would be good if holding Shift would also enable this.
    • Nathan: the only difference for this operator between Objects and Bones, is that Bones can be connected/disconnected. Any behaviour that is not about that should be consistent between Objects and Bones.
    • Module agrees to go for Philipp’s suggestion.
  • #133377: UI: Fix incorrect name for shape key property
    • Pablo Vazquez asked for feedback.
    • Module agrees this is a good change.

Help Needed

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-01-30T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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