2025-05-08 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2025-05-08T16:00:00Z. 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: Christoph Lendenfeld, Eduardo Rubio, Jeremy Bot, Nacho de Andrés, Nathan Vegdahl, Srivathsav Kyatham, 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

Landed

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

Blender

Technical Documentation

Ongoing Work

  • High Severity bugs:

  • Christoph:

    • Christoph’s weekly report
    • #132904: Assets: Create Asset thumbnails via a screenshot anywhere in Blender Updated with a feature to capture with transparency in 3D viewport
      • Christoph: is linking this to the Film: Transparent setting ok?
      • Sybren: bit convoluted, but not too bad.
      • Nathan: thinks it makes sense.
      • Christoph: alternative would be to switch the viewport to show the off-screen render with transparency, then you at least see the transparency. And you see that the UI disappears, and so it’s more visible what you’ll get in the screenshot.
      • Jeremy: why not always make the background transparent?
      • Christoph: you can use the background colour to categorize things, like all hand poses get a green background.
      • Nathan: the background colour could be a property of the asset, and handled by the asset browser/shelf.
      • Jeremy: That may make it easier to manage, too, as you can alter it later without having to recreate the thumbnail.
      • Nacho: the viewport is “transparent” to me. The colour that’s shown there is more my UI theme than a property of the asset.
      • Sybren will discuss with the Assets team.
    • #138498: Anim: add extra poll checks to bone eyedropper done on basis of a bug report
    • #137278: Anim: Common Playhead snapping for all editors still in review

  • Nathan:

  • Sybren:

  • Shape Keys

    • Hans Goudey finished #136853: Shape Keys: Add operator to update keys from selected objects
    • Also needs work: Left/Right symmetry options for these operators. Dalai Felinto is going to ask Hans to work on this too.
    • Hans also worked on #138330: Shape Keys: Use actual evaluated meshes in Update/Join operators
    • #136838: Shape Keys: multi-select & copy to selected
      • Sybren: this requires extending the TreeView UI element to support multi-select. Discussed with Julian Eisel, will be discussed in the module meeting.
      • Sybren: for now, we can add a checkbox for the ‘select’ state, so that we can move forward (adding the flag, adding Copy to Selected, etc).
      • Christoph: selection flag already exists, it’s used in the Shape Key mode of the Dope Sheet. Selecting a channel there will select the shape key itself; in any other Dope Sheet mode, the channel selection is not linked to the shape key itself.
      • Nathan: AFAIK the whole Shape Key mode of the Dope Sheet is so that you do not have to go to the Properties Editor to animate the blend values.
      • Christoph: I tried the checkbox, but there’s already a checkbox there (“Mute”), so it’s really confusing. Module agrees.
      • Sybren: I’ll check with the UI module, to see when they will be able to land the multi-selectability. If they think that can happen for Blender 4.5 goes to beta, this PR should be good to land as-is. Without that it’s a bit too hidden.
    • Dalai Felinto wrote in the chat: “Production schedule: For the records, the open project related to rigging pipeline starts soon. The rigging itself starts in June 16th, so technically having the more we have in early June the better (if possible of course).”"

  • Animator meeting at Blender HQ, with Rik Schutte, Demeter Dzadik, and Pablo Fournier:

    • Reprioritisation of short term goals:
      • Moved down #135105: Anim: Pose Mode bone walking, as Demeter gave some feedback on the current design, that it’s not as simple to do in a general way as the design may suggest. He will write things down on the tracker. Priority went down, because now there are more unknowns.
        • Continuing in the module meeting:
        • Nacho: To find parents/children, using the rest pose of the control rig could work, and just working position-based (instead of using the hierarchy).
        • Sybren: also I was thinking of the ‘Mini Map’ project, where that could also define those relationships.
      • Added #138482: Pose Bone visibility should be stored on the pose bone at quite high priority, just underneath the already-being-worked-on tasks.
    • #133399: Modeling: Set shape key default value to 1.0
      • Sybren: Sculpt and Mesh Edit modes are inconsistent. Mesh Edit mode always shows the active shape key at 100%. Sculpt mode does not do this. Maybe the PR is trying to solve this issue in the wrong way?
      • The others agree.
      • Continuing in the Module Meeting:
      • Sybren: Nika made good counter-points why the value=1.0 is a good thing, and mesh edit mode is the inconsistent one.
      • Demeter Dzadik has a nice proposal.
      • Sybren: likes Demeter’s proposal, but has doubts about moving the ‘Solo’ button from a single button to a per-shapekey one. Just checking the one button, and then walking through the different shapekeys, seems a nicer workflow than having to toggle the ‘solo’ on and off per shapekey.
      • Nathan: agrees with Sybren. Also when we add multi-select, having one ‘solo’ button that shows all of the selected ones (and only those) would work better than having to check all their ‘solo’ checkboxes too.

Nacho: auto-save interferes with animation playback

Nacho explains his workflow of setting up different 3D viewports to show an animated model from different sides. He then takes a screen capture with other software, while Blender is playing back the animation. Auto-save can interfere here, and cause slight pauses in the playback, ruining the screen capture.

  • Sybren: I think this is worthy of a bug report. Auto-save doesn’t work when you’re in the middle of a sculpt stroke either.
  • Nacho: it’s hard to reproduce, though, to intentionally get the auto-save to interfere like this. I’m pretty sure it’s not an add-on doing this, though.
  • Sybren: might be a nice feature to have the “blocked” status of the auto-save visible on screen. Might just be an optional thing, but it would help a lot to debug these kind of things.

Patches: Review & Decision Time

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-05-13T10:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.

2

This design could also be adopted for bone collections once multi-select is added, since the current solo workflow for bone collections is fairly cumbersome to use.

1 Like