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Animation & Rigging: Weak Areas

Here module members can keep track of weaker areas in the animation system.

NOTE: This is not meant to be an exhaustive list of all known issues. We have the issue tracker for that.

Animation Channel Filtering

Auto-keying

The auto-keying system appears to have been designed for transforms only, and as a result doesn't work well for other properties.

  • Transform operations can cause keying of non-transform properties, and non-transform operations often don't even auto-key (T88066: Auto Keying with "Only Active Keying Set" creates keyframes it shouldn't)
  • Custom keying sets are always absolute (in terms of which properties of which objects are keyed), instead of the often-expected "the named property of the active/selected objects".
  • T73524: Autokey keys disabled driver values
  • T73773: "Only Insert Needed" option in conjunction with keying set causes "Unable to Keyframe" warning message
  • T91134: Change autokey preferences "Only insert available" to "Only insert keyframes on existing F-curves"
  • T91135: Change autokey preferences "Only insert needed" to "Only insert keyframes on properties that have changed."
  • T91941: "Whole Character" keying set not working properly with autokey enabled
  • T95364: Autokey function hinders execution of drivers

Animation Cycles

Animation Cycles are an integral part of an animators life. In Blender they are technically supported, but suffer from poor visibility in terms of UX. In order to set up a scene for cyclic animation you have to:

  • Enable "Cycle Aware Keying".
  • Have an action on your armature and enable "Manual Frame Range" and "Cyclic Animation" on the Action.
  • Give the action the desired range.

When all that is set, Blender will add the "Cycles" FCurve modifier whenever an FCurve is created for the action. For this to work Blender has to ensure there are at least 2 frames on an FCurve.

Issues (not all valid bugs, but definitely usage issues)

  • #111322 Insert keyframe wrong with cycle-aware keying after deleting end frame

Design Tasks

  • #54724 Workflow improvements for creating Animation Loops

failed PRs

  • PR#116356 Fix: Cycle aware keying inserting first key

Mirroring and Symmetry

  • T61386: Mirror Paste for pose bones also copies custom properties
  • T65671: Armature X-Mirror inconsistencies
  • T74032: Pose Mode X-Axis Mirror is not working properly with IK when skeleton is moved
  • T76915: Pose bone: clearing transformations in pose mode does not affect the mirrored bones even when the X-axis mirror is activated.
  • T83657: In pose mode: Mirror X doesn't work with certain operations

Selection synchronization between pose bones and animation channels

In short, there is space for improvement regarding the synchronization between the selection state of bones (in the viewport) and channel rows (in the dope sheet/action editor/etc). Hjalti mentioned that it's probably better to synchronize less, that is, have the selections more separate. This new behavior would need to be properly designed & discussed, though.