2025-03-18 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting was on 2025-03-18T11:00:00Z. 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, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, Ivan Cappiello, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Rik Schutte, Sybren Stüvel

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 will be released today! SouthernShotty’s video on YouTube
  • Issue tracker label change: “High Priority” is now “High Severity”. It’s about the seriousness of the bug, and not necessarily about the speed at which it’s to be solved. Although often these will be related, of course.

Landed

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

Blender

User Manual

Ongoing Work

  • High Severity bugs:
  • Andy:
    • #135527: Fix #135062: Modeling: Add Auto Normalize when Assigning vertex weights
      • Sybren: mentions discussion about where to place the option, since it’s the same one as available in the 3D Viewport.
      • Nacho: they are different tasks, and available in different modes (Mesh Edit vs. Weight Paint).
      • Sybren: yes, it would be silly to have to switch modes just to change this option.
      • Nacho: Having this option shared is more because it’s used in one way of working. Splitting up into separate options would mean having to keep these hypothetical two options in sync manually.
      • Ivan: iirc the problem is that in the ui “normalize all” is not restricted to deforming bones and makes messes at some times
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Bugfixing for the 4.4 release.
    • #135732: Shape Keys: Tweak value slider range behavior
      • Made an example case with drivers, did indeed break the rig. PR is now closed, to make place for a better approach.
      • Sybren: probably better to allow multi-selecting shapekeys, and adding Copy to Selection support (which includes alt-drag).
      • Rik: isn’t that more work?
      • Sybren: yes, but it would also be more stable and appliccable for more situations (like copying the value, the range min/max, etc.)
      • Rik: sounds great, let’s make a design task.
      • Sybren: will make the design task.
      • Nacho: keep in mind that the first key (the base shape) is a bit different. But you can also move it down in the list, so maybe it can still be treated the same?
    • Plan: in the anim code, replace calls to WM_global_report*() with BKE_report*().
    • Playback looping options: contacted LauLoque (who’s working on merging his Loop Methods add-on into my add-on Unlooped) about the reason for the ping-pong looping. For him, it’s a way to “change perspective” on the animation (like drawing upside down) and looping without the jarring popping at the loop point. So actual concrete use case.
    • Responding to the Slotted Actions feedback thread.
    • Continued investigation of getting the Z-axis along the bone. Once Upon A Time there used to be one function that defined this, now there’s many more places that need changing.

Help Needed

Rik reminds the module of

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-03-27T17:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.