The meeting was on 2025-01-30T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).
Present: Andy Beers, Christoph Lendenfeld, David Woolf, Drew Medina, Drew Medina, Felipe G, Jeremy Bot, Nate Rupsis, Sybren Stüvel
People present are referred to by first name for brevity. Others are referred to by full name.
Links
- Video Call
- A&R Module Meetings calendar for inclusion in your own calendar app
- Previous & next meeting notes
- Long Term Plans & Current Focus
- Issues & Pull Requests
- #module-animation chat channel
- Draft agenda for any upcoming meetings
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
- Joseph Brandenburg released Mantis, his node-based rig generator (YouTube).
- Blender 4.4 will go to beta phase next Wednesday (milestone).
- Gitea got upgraded, some links might have been broken.
Landed
Names are from the Git log. This list is limited to functional improvements & bugfixes.
Blender
- 94b916a3bae: Fix #133362: crash when autokeying object with motion path but no action (Nathan Vegdahl)
- dd67b355eee: Anim: do not set slot ID type when Action is linked (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 1a35335fcdb: Anim: treat untyped slot identifiers (“XXSlot”) as wildcard (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 2440861afe6: Anim: fix ‘Fix to Camera’ poll function exception when camera is missing (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- d93b2d43d38: Anim: allow reordering Slots in Action Editor channel list (Nathan Vegdahl)
- 4fc6d7685bb: Fix #133635: “Move to Collection” acts on EditBones in hidden groups (Philipp Oeser)
Technical Documentation
- 1346bb94: Release Notes: Tweaks to 4.4 slotted actions (Brecht Van Lommel)
- 7a403e3b: Fix: broken Note box in layered action docs (Nathan Vegdahl)
- 269010ff: Anim: update description of Slot default naming scheme (Nathan Vegdahl)
- 7e762066: Release Notes: explain upgrading multi-file projects to Slotted Actions (Nathan Vegdahl)
User Manual
Ongoing Work
- High Prio bugs:
- Christoph:
- Nathan:
- Nathan’s weekly report
- Continuing work on Winter of Quality tasks for Slotted Actions.
- Created design task: #133725: Anim: switching assigned action on multiple data-blocks together
- Looking for feedback & discussion!
- Module agrees, this is nice and we need both approaches.
- Sybren: doesn’t want a popup every time an Action is switched to ask “what do you want”?
- Sybren: if Alt-click works, then also “Copy to Selected” should work.
- Drew: Where would the dialog show up with all the options?
- Sybren: that would likely be the “Redo Panel”. The Properties editor doesn’t have this Redo Panel though, so that makes this a very good question…
- Christoph: in the Properties editor, I wouldn’t expect Alt+click to switch all the users of the Action. It should work the same as other “Copy to Selected” in that area. Like for Mesh properties it can be about “selected vertices”, and it would be weird if this particular option were about selected objects instead.
- Sybren: maybe the “Extras” menu like we have next to lists-of-things would be the right place then.
- Sybren: The ‘Action Based’ operator could use its own little pop-up where you select an Action.
- Sybren: we also have to think about how this relates to library overrides, and linked (and thus immutable) data.
- Sybren:
- Sybren’s weekly report
- Copy-Paste: refactor has landed (#133497), will work on actually supporting slots early next week.
- ‘Wildcarding’ of typed & untyped slots (#133653)
- #133727: Anim: emit liboverride on slot handle when action is changed
- Little request from Pablo Fournier: new mode for Insert Key operator in Dope Sheet / Action Editor / Graph Editor, which inserts keys just like in the 3D Viewport.
- Question: what about objects whose animation data you do not see in that editor? For example, having two objects selected would key them both, but if they have separate Actions the Action Editor only shows one of them. Should that still key the 2nd object?
- Sybren: proposes to only insert keys for data-blocks that are visible in the animation editor right now.
- Christoph: that can be hard, because not-animated things are not shown in the dope sheet.
- Sybren: might be a nice query for the replacement animation filtering system: “which things are considered for display here?” rather than “what is animated now?”.
- Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
- Rik filed three weight painting bugs, all got closed by the triagers:
- #133664: Weightpainting: ‘Auto Normalize’ not working if an object doesn’t have an armature connected (armature modifier)
- Closed because not a bug.
- Sybren: it would be great if Vertex Groups could be put into folders / collections, and then normalization etc. could be applied per folder / collection.
- Jeremy (in the module meeting): that would be huge. It would also help to get them exported to UnrealEngine, which supports “weight profiles” for different LODs.
- Felipe (in the module meeting): also without bones, for example for GeoNodes, it would be very nice to have weight normalization.
- #133667: Weightpainting: ‘Auto Normalize’ not working with weight operators (e.g. Set weight) and vertex group assignments
- #133683: Weightpainting: Painting weights is not working on a single string of vertices (no faces)
- #133664: Weightpainting: ‘Auto Normalize’ not working if an object doesn’t have an armature connected (armature modifier)
- It’s clear that Weight Paint mode is an orphan (and has too many step-parents to raise it properly), falling between the Sculpt, Paint & Texture module and the Animation & Rigging module.
- Sybren will take it up with Dalai.
- Rik: Blending between NLA strips ignores the ‘Stepped’ modifier, and blending on 1s.
- Nate: Blending is kind of broken to begin with. I wouldn’t be surprised if this was never implemented. Create an issue for it, Nate might have time to look into it.
- Rik: Blending between NLA strips sometimes also blends to rest pose in the middle. Nathan will go and look.
- Sybren: might be a misunderstanding. Having the bottom layer at 50% and the top layer at “Replace” mode 50% will not create a 50/50 blend between the two. Rather it will take 50% between rest pose & the bottom, and then replace that for 50% with the top.
- Hjalti: Bone Custom Shape transform properties are not covered by the X-Mirror option. So tweaking those still has to happen on each side manually.
- Sybren: checks how other properties behave. In Armature Edit mode, dragging the bone head X property with X-mirror enabled will mirror. But in Pose mode, dragging the bone rotation X with X-mirror enabled does NOT mirror. That’s a bug.
- Rik: More tools could use the X-mirror option. Like the Breakdowner, applying/blending pose assets, etc.
- Sybren: would love to build an animation tool framework where it’s easy to build tools that change properties/transforms, and then the framewould would look at X-mirror and apply things mirrored as well. This should also blur the lines between Object and Bone/Armature rigs, and make those tools available in Object & Pose mode alike.
- Hjalti: The Shift+G operator (Select Groups, with lotsa options) in Object mode is much richer than in Pose mode. Would be nice low-hanging fruit to implement this for Pose mode as well.
- Rik filed three weight painting bugs, all got closed by the triagers:
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on 2025-02-06T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.