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Animation & Rigging

General

  • Slider Operators are now available with hotkeys. ALT+S for smoothing operators and ALT+D for blending operators. PR#107866 Animation: change Slider Popup menu hotkeys
  • The iTaSC IK solver now supports keeping root bones (i.e. without parent) positioned where they are, instead of always moving them to the armature's origin. For backward compatibility the old behavior is retained; new armatures will get the new behavior. This can be controlled via the new "Translate Roots" checkbox. (51c2a0f816)
  • Ctrl-LMB shortcut for channel renaming is removed. It is now used for Extend channel selection (6c4da68ad2).

Extend Paint Mask Selection

Add the option to grow/shrink the selection just as in Edit Mode. PR#105633 PR#105607

Duration Display in the Status Bar

It is now possible to display the scene duration in the status bar. The format is the following: Duration: <timecode> (Frame <current frame>/<total frames>) The timecode format follows the user preferences. PR#104882

Scene Duration Display

Frame Channels Operator

Allows to frame onto the contents of a channel, or a selection of channels. Works in the Graph Editor and the Dope Sheet. PR#104523 It is called with "." on the numpad or right click the channels and choose the "Frame Selected Channels" option. Alternatively press ALT+MMB to frame the channel under the cursor.

Copy Global Transform

The Copy Global Transform add-on can now also mirror the transform (606e4b35f2).

Options of Copy Global Transform

  • Object but no bone name: the transform will be mirrored relative to the object
  • Object and bone name: the transform will be mirrored relative to that specific bone of that specific armature
  • Bone name but no object: the transform will be mirrored relative to the named bone of the current armature

Bone Relation Lines

Instead of always drawing the relationship line from the head of the child to the tail of the parent, there is now choice for the parent side of the line. This can be toggled between the head and the tail of the bone, where the tail is Blender's original behavior and is retained as default value (45c1deac4f).

Options of bone relation lines

Different bone relation lines

Context properties

PR#105132 Drivers: Introduce the Context Properties

A special type for driver variable has been added: the Context Property.

The property is implicitly referring to either a scene or a view layer of the currently evaluating animation system. This is a weak reference which does not lead to the scene or view layer referenced from the driver to be linked when linking animation data.

An example when such properties comes in play is referring to a transformation of the active camera. It is possible to setup driver in a character file, and make the driver use the set camera when the character is linked into a set.

New Parent Space transformation

PR#104724 Animation: New parent space transformation aligns child objects / armature bones to parent space.

Child object using parent space transformation gizmo

Child bone using parent space transformation gizmo

Graph Editor

Settings moved to the User Preferences

Two view options in the Graph Editor have been moved to the User Preferences (Only Selected Curve Keyframes, Use High Quality Display). (PR#104532 Animation: Move Graph Editor settings to User Preferences)

Key menu cleaned up

The "Key" menu in the Graph Editor has been cleaned up. Things that have to do with channels were moved into the "Channels" menu. The rest has been grouped into sub-menus where possible. PR#106113 Animation: Clean up "Key" menu in Graph Editor

Gaussian Smooth Operator

PR#105635 A new operator to smooth keyframe data. It improves on the current implementation in the following ways.

  • Supports modal operations
  • Is independent of key density
  • More options in the redo panel
  • Smooths sudden spikes more predictable
Demo of the Gaussian Smooth operator

Keyframes

  • Add option to insert keyframes only on the active F-Curve. PR#106307
  • Pasting keys in the Graph Editor now has value offset options. PR#104512

Small Tweaks

  • When hitting normalize, the y extents of visible F-Curves are frame automatically. PR#105857
  • When the view is normalized, the area outside of -1/1 is drawn slightly darker. PR#106302
  • Ignore hidden curves when jumping to keyframes in the Graph Editor. PR#108549

Dope Sheet

  • Added the pin icon to the channels in the Dope Sheet
  • Clamp the viewport in the Dope Sheet so channels cannot go off screen. PR#104516

NLA

  • Clicking the NLA/Graph Editor search box no longer scrolls the items below it. (d1219b727c).

NLA solo button now right aligned

  • NLA track Solo button has been moved on the to be right aligned to group it logically with Mute, Lock track buttons.(d8024135a5).
  • NLA strips can now be dragged horizontal through other strips on the same track (8833f5dbf9).

NLA horizontal drag and drop

Python API

FCurve key deduplication + exposing the innards of fcurve.update()

New functions on fcurve.keyframe_points (85ed2e8c36):

- deduplicate(): Removes duplicate keys (i.e. when there are multiple keys on the same point in time) by retaining the last key of those duplicates based on their index in the fcurve.keyframe_points array. - sort(): Ensure the keys are chronologically sorted. - handles_recalc(): Recalculate the handles, to update 'auto'-type handles.

Calling fcurve.update() actually performs sort() and then handles_recalc(), and now those two steps are exposed as individual functions as well.

Note that in Blender 4.0 fcurve.update() will also be calling the deduplicate() function.