2025-06-05 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Meetings
1

The meeting will be on 2025-06-05T16:00:00Z. 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, Daniel Salazar, David Woolf, Drew Medina, Jean-Silas Moor, MohammadHossein Jamshidi, Nate Rupsis

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 4.5 has entered Beta. main branch is now v5.0.

Landed

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

Blender

Technical Documentation

User Manual

Ongoing Work

Patches: Review & Decision Time

  • RCS proposal about assigning slots automatically if there is only one: Right-Click Select — Blender Community
    • Sybren wrote a response to explain why this was implemented this way. In short: always auto-assigning means that the current values of properties will be overwritten by the animation data, immediately, without a way to avoid this. Choosing the wrong slot here will destroy data.
  • #139398: Fix #138764: Draw weak grid lines on every second frame community PR about the timeline lines issue we discussed a few meetings ago
    • Nate: lgtm but I am not an animator
    • Thumbs up from mohammad and david
    • No big response, can just land
  • RCS proposal about expanding [/] keys (select parent/children) to (optionally) ignore hidden bones. So with a root → hidden child → grandchild hierarchy, the hidden child bone would be skipped, and ‘select parent’ on grandchild would select root.
    • Christoph: Could do that, but could also just implement a system that allows riggers to specify what happens when pickwalking
    • David agrees, in the future riggers may do weird stuff with geonodes
    • Jean-Silas: Original proposal simple enough to implement in Blender. May be a better first step
    • Christoph: Not sure where the setting would live, armature, bone, user prefs?
    • Mohammad: Can be a checkbox to ignore hidden bones. For animators probably best in prefs, in the future for node systems probably within the system.
    • david: use case for metahuman rigs on top. Needs to have way to skip bones too. Hiding should be enough.
    • Jean: Future could be an API so riggers can build custom behavior.
    • Conclusion: Sounds like a useful feature. Do “ignore hidden” as a first step.
  • #139347: Fix: Graph Editor box select menu entries
    • Box select has an option to “Ignore Handles”, meaning it will not work when dragging over handles.
    • Let’s decide which Box Selection options we want, and how they should behave.
    • Jean-Silas: Maybe it’s just a documentation issue. Maybe tooltips should expand → UI Module. So we can have a long tooltip that expands. Progressive Disclosure is the fancy UX term.
    • Christoph: We could give a better description in the tooltip than trying to condense it into a few works for the operator name
    • Other software uses “crossing/window” or “strict”

Help Needed

  • playhead snap icons

  • Daniel’s proposal is online: #139465: Per bone In-Front display

    • Everybody is convinced
    • Just a matter of putting it on somebodys plate

  • Talk about making more tools work with Delta Transforms

    • Jean-Silas: should there be a setting during modal operations. Or just a setting in a menu, or the redo panel.
    • Jean-Silas: Modal operations can be dangerous when pressing it accidentally.
    • Christoph: Agrees, probably best to have an explicit option for it.

Next Meeting

The next meeting will be on 2025-06-12T16:00:00Z. Again it will be open for everybody who’s interested. The provisionary meeting agenda will be updated before the meeting.