2025-06-26 Animation & Rigging module meeting

Not sure exactly what this pertains to, but I hope you don’t mind me bringing up a small papercut. Or at least I think it’s a papercut?


I’ve always liked in blender how the keyframes and the playhead work. A lot of other programs that do animation have the keyframe coming after the playheads line. It works well when very when zoomed in on the timeline to the point that you see each frame taking up a large part of the timeline, but on any other scale I find it just causes some kind of cognitive dissonance. Am I on the frame? Does it come next? Where is the frame exactly?

Blender does not have this dissonance for me because the playhead splits the keyframe right in the middle. The keyframes are even diamond shaped in the timeline, so the top corner of the diamonds match up with the playhead. It’s just so clear what keyframe/frame I am on!

In reality, however, the playhead comes just a little to the left side of the keyframe it’s on, as shown in the picture above. I feel like the keyframe should have an equal amount of pixels on each side. It might be a UI papercut, but at the same time maybe this was done consciously so that there is a larger portion of the keyframe for the user to latch onto visually. I wonder if anyone knows about this?


I tried adjusting it Krita, but the playheads blue part of the line is 2 pixels wide, and no matter where you orient it, it doesn’t split the keyframe equally.

If this is by design its fine, but if not I wonder if there is a way to reconcile this. It sorta bothers me on a primal level :joy:

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