The meeting will be on 2025-03-13T17:00:00Z. 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: Andy Beers, Christoph Lendenfeld, Drew Medina, Felipe G, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nitin Rawat, Sybren Stüvel
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
- Blender 4.4 Release Candidate released (download from buildbot), focus is on finding & fixing bugs.
Landed
Names are from the Git log. This list is limited to functional improvements & bugfixes.
Blender
- 308e81fd8a8: Fix #135438: Prevent vertex group name collision when renaming bones (Yiming Wu)
- d18fe0c575a: Fix #135523: Calculate Motion Paths ignores Selected Keys option (Philipp Oeser)
- cf95ff1a6e8: Fix #129782: ActionSlot channels in Action Editor mode lack background (Philipp Oeser)
- 07c38e56120: Fix #135290: NLA move channel crash when Grease Pencil object data animation is present (Pratik Borhade)
- b71fed904b7: Cleanup: Remove F-Curve handling from undo in Curve edit mode (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- b634fd04edc: Fix #133010: Rigify operators for copying rig-type parameters fail (Nathan Vegdahl)
- 216964c6970: Fix: Crash when scene has F-Curves for VSE sequencer strips, but no VSE (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 955e02c90d3: Fix: Duplicating a Scene does not remove animation from slotted actions (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 064421a02dc: Anim: expose Action Slot users to RNA (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 5740aded5e1: Fix: “Remove Empty Animation Data” (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 7aeef872502: Fix: Shape Key animation not showing in Dope Sheet (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- e7410abacad: Fix #135666: Renaming a slot used by multiple IDs breaks animation on certain channels (Christoph Lendenfeld)
- 9c1845dbf20: Fix #135775: Bake to an empty Action using bake_action_objects throws error (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 1d20304442a: Fix #135894: after “Merge Animation” animation does not play properly (Sybren A. Stüvel)
- 30ba81f8058: Fix #135894: Assigned Action can mute NLA strip when reusing the same Action (Sybren A. Stüvel)
Technical Documentation
- 70787de8: 4.4: add
ActionSlot.users()to the example code (Sybren A. Stüvel)
Ongoing Work
- High Prio bugs:
- Christoph:
- Christoph’s weekly report
- testing blender 4.4
- started looking into playhead snapping for 4.5
- Prototype: #135913
- Todo task: #135794
- Design: #91973
- To discuss: How does snapping to seconds and snapping to keys play together? Currently snapping to seconds ALWAYS snaps to the nearest second, whereas snapping to keys would only activate if close to a key.
- Sybren: snapping to seconds in the same way (only snapping when close) sounds fine too.
- Christoph: that’s what the prototype is doing. I’ll just keep that, and wait for feedback when there’s a test build.
- Sybren: since snapping is kind of niche, I think it’s best to go for a unified approach that’s easy to combine with other snapping methods.
- Decision: until we have a concrete counter-example, make snapping to seconds behave as the rest.
- Nathan:
- Sybren:
- Sybren’s weekly report
- Bug fixes for 4.4
- #134687: Ctrl-P “Armature with Envelope Weights” Does not use Envelope Weights
- #135732: Shape Keys: Tweak value slider range behavior
- Change is liked, reduces manual labour.
- Sybren is worried about backward compatibility, since changes to the blend value are no longer clamped.
- Sybren: drivers can cause trouble here. All of a sudden, drivers can set arbitrary values, without getting clamped to the allowed range.
- Sybren & Christoph: this feels like a workaround to having multi-select on the shapekeys, and using “Copy to Selected”.
- Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
- Skipped to fix more bugs.
Patches: Review & Decision Time
- #135697: UI: Add Footer to Animation/VSE Editors
- Pablo Vazquez made this PR. It just adds the timeline controls to footers in all other animation editors. No redesign, no removal of the timeline editor itself.
- Christoph: love it.
- More thumbs up from the module.
- Christoph: some of the options in the Playback menu may also be available in the editor menus themselves, and may contradict these settings.
- Christoph: maybe we should limit this to the buttons first. Then we can look at which settings to port on a one-by-one basis.
- Christoph will check out the PR.
Help Needed
- #134160: Weight Painting Stroke Falloff Not Rounding
- Needs feedback from people who use weight painting.
- Christoph: this has come up a lot on right-click select. It’s about the multiplication of the vertex weight with the brush weight, with a falloff. Unless you exactly hit the vertex (which is very unlikely) this will never bring the value all the way to zero.
- Christoph: maybe if the weight is a tiny amount, we should just clamp it to zero?
- Sybren: yeah that makes sense.
Next Meeting
The next meeting will be on 2025-03-18T11:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.