ChrisNathSyb Team Meetings

# ChrisNathSyb Team Meetings ## 2026-01-20 ## 2026-01-13 - Nathan: wants to deliver Project Setup such that the foundation is there, and can be worked on by other people. ## 2026-01-06 Nathan, Christoph, Sybren catch-up - Nathan: some stress with a flaky tax service dude. Apart from that, had a great time over the holiday. - Discussing dependency graph. Sybren has PR to add a node for 'bone visibility' ([#152416: Fix #152121: Blender 5.0 dependency cycle on pose bone visibility](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/152416)). Nathan will read through depsgraph docs. Is going to be quite relevant for layered animation (and already for slotted actions) to build a more granular depsgraph. - Christoph: - Quite far in removal of legacy Action code. - Highest prio for Sybren to give feedback on: [#151765: Fix: Shapekey kernel code with unequal element counts](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/151765). Once landed, it should be trivial to add threading to shapekey evaluation. This would wrap up the shapekey performance topic. - Sybren is working on Remote Asset Libraries - Finishing up the Disk File Hashing Service (C++ wrapper) - Will write code for the Asset system to hook into, to check whether asset files are still current, or a different version is available online. - Then mostly design & discussion work, about extending the Extensions platform with asset libraries. - Nathan: - Bugfixing a crash that happens with path templates. [#152407](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/152407) - Working on PR [#140924: WIP: Project Awareness and UI](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/140924). Will do a self-review pass, update the PR description, and then it should be review-ready. - Not sure about schedule, but shouldn't be far off 😹 - Sybren will plan a call with Dylan Brown about graph editor improvements. - Might work at 7:00 Yuza / 14:00 Vancouver / 23:00 Amsterdam time. ## 2025-12-16 Nathan & Sybren: Project Setup - Made progress, but less than Nathan would have liked. - Nick has PR to get the file browser to not overwrite path variables (so you can pick a file and it retains the vars in the path). Nick can't finish the patch, Nathan will do the final push. - Julian made PR for some UI work that blocked Nathan, has landed in `main` now - Almost review ready, still on schedule for original estimate ## 2025-12-09 Nathan on holiday. ### Current Focus Christoph : - Speedups - Refactors PRs, waiting for review by Sybren - Removed more Legacy Action code - Will continue working on editing of asset metadata - Includes Description, Copyright, and Author - Does not include filename of the `.asset.blend` - Also does not include the catalog (which is a concrete problem with poses in `.asset.blend`) Sybren : - Finishing up Python stuff in Remote Asset Libraries project - Reviews & catching up - Winter of Quality ### Pose/Asset Library discussion - Sybren had feedback from `${USER}` that it's unexpected that the pose library deals with custom properties in an 'asymmetric' way (to put in pose, they need to be keyed, while to apply, they do not need to be keyed). - Sybren: more important is auto-filtering of pose assets in the asset shelf, based on the active character rig - Christoph: for feature film we'll also need animations in the library - Sybren: then we also need in-context editing of the assets, like loading in the `.asset.blend`, seeing the Action in action (hah!) and in the graph editor. And after editing, save it back to the same `.asset.blend` file. - Christoph: it might become an issue with multiple people writing to the same asset library, when we scale up to feature film production. ## 2025-12-02 about Project Setup progress - More people on the project? - Hasn't met up with Sebastian since the earlier meeting where the work was divvied up. He should be looking at getting project-specific asset libraries. Needs work that Nathan is doing now to land, before he can really do things well. - Nathan still working on the "initial project setup" feature. Had a meeting about this with Dalai, end is getting in sight. - Nathan has 4 more workdays this month/year. - Almost feature-complete, needs one or two minor things in there before it works. Then feedback cycles with Dalai to get things polished. Then similar cycles for code review. Will likely end early January. - Julian has a PR that needs to land first, before Nathan's work can land: [#149851: UI: Allow using panel categories to define navigation sections generally](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/149851) - Nathan: maybe Sebastian should become the project lead? Might make more sense, because Nathan only works 2 days a week and remote. He'll discuss this with Sebastian, Natalie, and Dalai. ## 2025-11-25 ### Current Focus Sybren : - Will put the Winter of Quality plan on the tracker. - 'New' idea: add preference for default bone rotation mode. - Solved Flamenco database issues & worked on Flamenco & BAT. - Plans to release Flamenco v3.8 this week. - Rest is Remote Asset Libraries. - In spare time: made an add-on that makes Autokey a preference (still in development). It always saves the file with Autokey disabled, and after saving & loading it enables it based on a preference (so it's no longer a per-scene setting). - Christoph: talked with Julian some years ago, biggest issue to implement this in Blender is that preference auto-saving can be turned off. - Sybren: we need 'persistent properties' as a separate feature. - Maybe Winter of Quality thing? - Sybren: and then we need a preference to turn on 'persistence of autokey' (for backward compatibility). Christoph : - Fixing high-prio bugs - Looking at cleanup of legacy Action code - NLA-specific case that (somewhat) forces all 4 channels of quaternions to be keyed simultaneously (but still can be circumvented via the N-panel). This was not ported to slotted Actions, nobody noticed, can we remove it? - **Conclusion:** let's remove it. To port it to the new system will require re-thinking it anyway. And it might become significantly easier with the new data model. - Worked on performance of animation system - Reporting benchmarks as FPS vs. time (in [#149390: Benchmark: Allow FPS result](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/149390)): probably better to automatically switch to different scales of time (sec, msec, ųsec) Nathan : - Heads down on Project Setup, close to being able to land it. - Taking a day off next week. Maybe taking both days the week after that. - Dalai's idea, of having a "project manager" where you can access & copy settings from other projects than the current, should not be part of this phase. It's interesting, but not for now. - As part of other client work: Looked into Library Overrides options ("Selected", "Content", and "Selected and Content"), and of those only the first seems to work well. Proposes to remove the other two, since they are unreliable, and only a convenience option (you can change the selection and use "Selected"). Because they are unreliable, they are failing at being a convenience. ## 2025-10-14 ### Current Focus Nathan : - Focusing mostly on Project Setup - Happy to do PR reviews, and bug fixes that are well-suited for him Christoph : - Bugfixes!!! - !!! Sybren : - Focusing mostly on Remote Asset Libraries - Also doing bugfixes & PR reviews ### Project Planning Nathan: not for everything it makes sense to land after 3 months. Example: Cycles wasn't useful after 3 months of working on it. Better to first consider the project as a whole, and then see how it can be split up into landable sub-projects. - Next year: Layered Animation. Each point here could be a small project by itself. - Design work: top-down or bottom-up ordering? → just implement it, see how it feels. Make sure it's not so hard to play with in the implementation. - Anim Filtering System (which includes 'channel definitions') replacement. Already makes sense without multi-layering, as newer features in other areas also need adjusting here. For example, the addition of 'The Sequencer Scene', which has animation of its own. Also the Scene's Compositor Node Tree was added to the filtering system recently. - Design: query editor/context for animation data (vs. now having to have the exact same set of flags in each operator vs. the editor they're used in) - Add translation layer for not-yet-ported calls to `ANIM_animdata_filter()` - Earlier ponderings (has to be updated, was still with NLA in mind): https://hackmd.io/iPobCBRkS8-uvBCJcW1HTg - Note: already take strip offsets into account, will be hard to add layer. And already necessary for NLA support. - Make it possible to show any Action in the Action Editor (without assigning to the active Object). - Remove 'Baklava phase 1' assertions and limitations, by adding the concept of 'the active layer' and operating only on that (instead of assuming there is only one layer). - Impl work: remove assertions, update channelbag-getting code - UI work: panel with props of active layer (mix mode, influence, mute, lock) - UI work: add layers to the dope sheet & graph editor - First experimental deliverable: add a side-panel with list of layers, and allow picking the active layer. All editors only consider data from this layer. - Animation Tools framework, which makes it considerably easier to add tools that Just Work(TM). Should make it easy to work on/with (so also do modifications of) just the animation data of the active layer. - First phase: stupid simple implementation, to understand the minimal API. - Second phase: add auto-keying, abstract 'transformables' (instead of only writing for bones or objects). - MVP: use it for the in-betweener on a 'middle layer'. - Note: already take strip offsets into account, will be hard to add layer. - Port existing tools to that framework, to make them work correctly. - Can be on a tool-by-tool basis - Final bits to get feature parity with NLA: - Add control curve for layer influence. - Add layer-level F-Curve modifiers (like stepped animation). - Winter of Quality - Remove code that handles legacy Actions. - Add performance tests/benchmarks for animation evaluation. - Improve performance of animation system - Implement a 'result' type to deal with error handling/passing, using it to improve code in the animation system. - Reduce noisiness of the console output when adding keys (but not all can be added due to preferences etc.) ## 2025-09-30 - Everybody recovered from BConf - Sybren: - Worked on [#146586: Anim: remove Action legacy Python API](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/146586) - will check correctness of `action.user_clear()` RNA function. - Tackled database issue with Flamenco. - Taking over from Demeter: - [#146182: Rigify: Full Action Slot Support in Blender 5.0](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/146182) - [#146287: Fix #144641 (for 4.5 LTS): Rigify: Assign first slot for Action constraints](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/146287/files) - If there is time: start writing blog post on workshop. - Christoph: - [#146102: Anim: Move pose bone selection state to bPoseChannel](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/146102) - [#145577: Remove Timeline](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/145577) - [#141644: Anim: f-curve smoothing modifier](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/pulls/141644/files) waiting for final (minor) feedback Sybren, will land today - Nathan: - Recovering from jetlag. - Landlord came around with someone to pick up futons (his house is full of those), and took the day off to subs to another week. - Took the time to write a proper invoice template, also for future use. - Still issues building Blender on his system. If not solved soon, will swap NixOS for Ubuntu. - Will focus on 5.0 beta / high-prio things, then switch back to Project Setup work. - High Prio issues, team will work on this after the beta split-off. - [#146675: Rigify not longer draws side panel buttons](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/146675) → Nathan - [#146916: False Warning of Loaded a pre-2.50 blend file if a file is PACKed](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/146916) → Sybren - [#146242: Blender crashes when using the Align Bones operator across two armatures with different mirror settings](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/146242) → whoever grabs it first - [#146105: Animation is not deleting when Bake Simulation was used](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/146105) → Christoph - Few more things to remove for 5.0 ([#119626](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/119626)): - Remove `keyframe_insert` flag → Nathan - Remove legacy F-Curve noise → moved to 6.0 - [#145577: Remove Timeline](https://projects.blender.org/blender/blender/issues/145577) → Christoph - Versioning blend files to add/remove editors is very hard. - Will just change Timeline editors to Dope Sheet, showing the footer.