2025-05-01 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2025-05-01T16:00:00Z. 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: Daniel Salazar, David Woolf, Jeremy Bot, Nathan Vegdahl, Raymond Luc, 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 4.4.3 has been released. 4.4.2 was very briefly in the release process, but pulled because of a high-prio crash.

Landed

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

Blender

Ongoing Work

  • High Severity bugs:
  • Christoph:
  • Nathan:
  • Sybren:
    • Sybren’s weekly report
    • Mostly PR reviews and bug fixes.
    • Hopefully fixed a bug in Fifids the chatbot, which caused it to stop downloading the calendar.
  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Hjalti Hjálmarsson, and Pablo Fournier:
    • There are some features that are important for the upcoming facial rigging project, and it would be good to have a way to prioritize those getting implemented/landed.
    • Rik & Hjalti: slot auto-assign doesn’t seem to be working reliably. When working in scenes where we’re creating and switching between multiple animations, we often end up having to manually select the slots.
      • Nathan: it should select them automatically by name, so there might be a bug.
      • Hjalti: we often name the slots something other than the object name. E.g. the object might be “Jeff.rig” but we just want the slot called “Jeff”.
      • Nathan: even so, it should work fine as long as all the slots for that character in the different actions have the same name.
      • Hjalti: maybe it’s a library linking thing?
      • Nathan: could be, but we’ll need repro to track it down either way.
      • We do some tests with a local, non-library-linked file, just to sanity-check.
      • Nathan: oh, apparently creating a new slot by hand (not via key insertion) always names the slot after the data-block, not the last-used-slot. That seems like a bug to me, but maybe there’s some obscure reason I’m forgetting. I’ll check with Sybren. Anyway, this could be what’s going on.
    • Hjalti: I’ve run into a couple of annoying issues, which I’ve brought up before. Not sure if they’ve fallen by the wayside:
      • Bone visibility (i.e. hiding individual bones) is reset (forgotten) by Blender on library-overriden armatures upon reloading the file.
      • Animation channel collapse states (in dopesheet, graph editor, …) are not remembered upon reloading the file.
      • Continuing in the module meeting:
      • Sybren: the visibility (and also the selection state) is stored on the Armature, and not the Object. Even when it’s about pose mode, and the pose is stored on the object, the pose-mode visibility is not. This should be addressed.
      • Sybren: selection of “F-Curve groups for bones” and “the bones themselves” is also synced, but not always, and there are a bunch of reported issues regarding that: Weak Areas - Blender Developer Documentation
      • Sybren: the collapse states should be investigated, a bug report with steps to reproduce are necessary to have here.

Patches: Review & Decision Time

Raymond: selecting perfectly-overlapping bones

Right now to bones that overlap, say two root bones of two characters constrained to the same car, are super hard to select. They are even Z-fighting when drawn.

  • Raymond: prioritizing the active Armature object would help.
  • Sybren: likes that, feels natural and doesn’t require any other interactions.
  • Sybren will poke Jonas Holtzman about this, as he is working on bone selection improvements.

Raymond: hiding bones while manipulating

Raymond shows a proof of concept made by Cody Winchester. While manipulating the selected bones, it hides all the other bones.

  • Module likes the approach. It makes the UI a bit clearer while you’re manipulating things.
  • Sybren: to avoid a “glitchy” appearance, it would be nice if the bones could quickly fade in/out. That makes it appear more as an intentional feature. Raymond agrees.
  • Raymond is going to discuss with Cody about sending in a design proposal.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-05-08T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

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