2025-04-10 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2025-04-10T16:00:00Z. 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, David Woolf, Jorn Boven, Nathan Vegdahl, Raymond Luc, Srivathsav Kyataham

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

  • Dalai Felinto wrote:

    Hi, this is a write up of some of the bone orientations problems we have when mixing rigs from different DCCs:
    Rigging orientation mismatch between Blender and other DCCs

    I hope this can help to spark some discussion between the animation & rigging module as well the I/O. It would be beautiful to see this tackled at some point :slight_smile:

Landed

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

Blender

Ongoing Work

Patches: Review & Decision Time

  • #136952: Fix #127175: KeyingSets: Always show ‘Available’ option in Insert Keyframe Menu

    • Hiding ‘Available’ when there are no available F-Curves (current behaviour) changes the hotkey assignment of all other menu items.
    • Module thinks it’s best to always have the keying set in shown. Both because of the menu shortcut issue and also because right now ‘Available’ disappears even in some cases where it could still be used (e.g. when only the active selection has no keys, even when the other selections do).
    • Decision: always show the ‘Available’ keying set.

  • #137172: WIP: Anim: add armature viewport display setting Max Bone Width

    • Sybren WIP PR that’s somewhat relevant: #106230: WIP: anim/armature-mode-spheres
    • Nathan: really appreciates #137172, but isn’t sure if it’s the right solution to the problem.
    • Christoph: why not just do it similar to BBone thickness where its driven by properties
      • Jorn: Thumbs up
      • Nathan: Likes the idea. Devils advocate, Ares’s solution probably works fine in most use cases. BBone approach has to be controlled manually, which can be obnoxious in many cases.
    • Nathan: Doesn’t like throwing user options at a problem, but nevertheless wants to consider: dropdown menu with different options for how bone widith is handled. Could include current behavior, Aras’s solution, and manual per-bone width.
    • Andy: Why not just add an option to the stick draw mode to show the direction and orientation
      • Nathan: already possible with bone axis display
    • Raymond: prefers to manually scale bones since it’s easy to access with the hotkey. Most of them would be at default.
    • Jorn: likes the BBone scale option, but it would be good to have an operator that batch applies a width to a bunch of bones according to some logic (i.e. bone lenght, hierarchy depth…).
    • Nathan: Do we need to preserve backwards compatibility? I.e. make a new display option and preserve the old behavior.
      • Christoph: Not a fan of another draw mode. We can version the manual bone width to match what the current octohedral width would be.
    • Nathan: The nice thing about the current behavior (auto-width based on bone size) is you can just focus on building the structure of the armature. It’s really convenient.
    • Nathan: Bone width could be a factor of the bone length, rather than an absolute width. So it would behave much like the current behavior, but you can adjust as needed.
      • Module doesn’t like this idea, because it leads to fiddly behavior where you have to re-adjust the width of a bone whenever you change it’s length if you want the width to remain the same.
    • Jorn: Instead, we could add an option to interactively scale bone width when bone length is changed. This could be toggled on/off depending on what the user is doing.
    • Christoph: Likes Jorns idea, an option to scale the bone display width when modifying the bone length. Either pressing S or moving the end points.
    • Decision: Control octahedral bones’ display width like BBones. Add options to auto-scale the bone width when editing length. Make a PR that implements those ideas and then gather feedback from them.

  • #137090: Bone Collection Soloing Doesn’t Hide Unassigned Bones

    • Solo’ing a Bone Collection only hides bones that are in other bone collections. It does not hide bones that are not party of any collection.
    • To decide: should this behaviour stay? Or change for 5.0?
    • Decision: change for 5.0.

  • #116163: Anim: Add falloff shape property to Weight Paint context menu

    • To decide: keep going and actually work on it, or reject the idea for some reason and close for good?
    • Module thinks this PR is a good idea.
    • Decision: keep going and work on it.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-04-15T10:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

4 Likes
2

What should the behavior of keyframe jump in the 3D Viewport do?

I had an idea about this: what if we use the union of keyframes in all open animation editors?

Not sure what challenges would be involved in implementation, or even if it would actually be good from a user perspective. And it still leaves the question of what to do when there are no open animation editors. But I wanted to put the idea out there so it’s not only in my head.

2 Likes