2025-02-07 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting was on 2025-02-06T17:00:00Z. It is open for everybody interested to join the video call (link below).

Present: Andy Beers, Christoph Lendenfeld, David Woolf, Dorothee Dittrich Drew Medina, Felipe G, Jeremy Bot, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, 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

  • Blender 4.4 is in beta phase, main branch is now Blender 4.5-alpha.
  • Winter of Quality project is over. Blog post will be published soon. Update: the blog post has been published.

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:
    • Nathan’s weekly report
    • Working on finishing up some remaining documentation tasks that I delayed in order to get things landed before 4.4 beta:
    • Will be switching over to the Project Setup project soon, but will take a bit of time to update Camera Shakify for Blender 4.4 and Slotted Actions first.
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Landed bunch of stuff just in time for the beta (Keyframe Copy-Paste, extend library override support for slot handles)
    • To decide: do we declare the NLA as in “maintenance mode” on the wiki?
      • This would mean all bug reports about operators not working well with the NLA as “known issue”.
      • Nathan: in practice it already is in “maintenance mode”.
      • Module agrees.
    • To decide: Do we make a design task for dropping pre-2.50 animation support from the versioning code, and propose to the 5.0 coordination team?
      • Alternative: make linking of pre-2.50 animation data actually work, as that’s likely now possible given Blender’s current features.
      • Currently there are no concrete plans by other modules to remove older versioning code.
      • Christoph: my opinion is “let it die”. We shouldn’t spend time on this, number of users affected will be very low. They can always open their files with Blender 4.4/4.5 and it will be upgraded to something modern.
      • Nacho: we are bringing a whole new animation paradigm to Blender, it’s ok to move on.
      • Sybren: it’s not so much time effort we have to keep things in there. It’s mostly something we have to consider for newer versioning code.
      • Nathan: the ancient versioning code has enough complexity that it makes me nervous, because it has a lot of implications for the ordering of versioning code.
      • Nathan: also that gnarly code is not that well tested, because very few people actually use & test it. That means that the expectations are high for it being correct, and we could be facing nasty bug reports. Having a clear cut-off point gives everybody more piece of mind, especially when Blender can produce a warning “this has too old anim data, open with 4.5 and save again”.
      • Decision: remove the pre-2.50 versioning code.
    • Gathering feedback on Slotted Actions:
    • To decide: short-term plans for the module.
      • Christoph: reducing from 3 to 2 days/week.
      • Nathan: going to work on the Project Setup project. Moving to Japan soon-ish and then reducing from 4 to 2 days/week.
      • Sybren: going to work on the Online Asset Repositories project. Will work 2 hours ever working day on Animation & Rigging, effectively reducing from 4 to 1 day/week.
      • Sybren’s proposal: finish already-running tasks / designs that were put on hold for Slotted Actions. Examples:
      • Everything on the Winter of Quality list that we didn’t get to yet.
      • … and there’s plenty more started-but-not-finished endeavours.
      • Nathan: having a breather here before we build something big & new is going to be a good thing.
      • Andy: wants to volunteer as coder & start working on things. Felipe too.
      • Sybren: we can do a quick video call, then, to get you giong. Felipe also wants to join.
      • Drew: not a coder, but wants to design a new “Solo” icon to replace the star icon. Will talk with the UI module.
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte and Hjalti Hjálmarsson:

Patches: Review & Decision Time

  • #134169: Animation: Allow overriding transform locks on posed bones.
    • Bastien Montagne asked in the chat: would you by any chance happen to know/remember why transform locks are not overridable on PoseBones? My guess would be that it was to prevent animators unlocking something locked by the rigger, but… Andy Goralczyk would need this, anything against me enabling it in 4.4?
    • Nathan: IIRC you can still manually set the values in the property fields anyway, it only locks them from being transformed in the viewport. So it doesn’t really keep animators from screwing up rigs anyway.
    • Sybren: I think it’s fine. The rigger can use the locks to specify their intent. Overriding these locks is still an explicit action, and done knowing that it might break the rig. So for “protecting the rig” purposes I think it’s still fine to allow overrides.
    • Christoph: we need a way to lock & set as ‘non-keyable’, but these locks are not a way to do this quite yet.
    • Nacho: has an operator in an add-on that goes over locked things in the rig, and then deletes animation keys on those channels.
    • Nathan: currently there’s a hack to lock things: add a driver that has no target/variables, and just produces a hard-coded value. It’s not a good way, but it works :joy_cat:
    • Felipe: I think that op Nacho implemented should be native for exporting.
    • Module agrees, is good PR.
  • #132819: Fix Unreported: Use correct icons for pose markers
    • Sybren explains how ‘active marker’ is no longer very relevant, because that was used for selecting poses in the old pose library.
    • Nacho: consistency with the other markers is most important here.
    • Nathan: agrees. We can do the differentiating drawing of the active marker later, for now the confusion is in the icon use.
    • Module agrees with Sybren’s proposal. Without the ‘active’ marker highlighting, even.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-02-13T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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