User:BradClark

May 29 - June 2nd

  • Working on setting up user personas for animators to help guide features/workflow tools
  • Created a small slide show example for meeting with Nathan V. in the morning to better show a unified animation editing workflow with the File level action/scene level track-object level animation filtering always being active so you are never outside a clip and it is easy to edit clip contents.
  • Having animation be able to have an Animation Node modifer tree to process and procedualy adjust animation like Geo-nodes now and write back to the clip as output for blending and layering in the NLA.


May 22 - 26

22nd

  • Meet with Jason Schleifer to gather some animator feedback on blocking issues with current animation layer system/NLA
  • Start rewriting/rough draft of animation system goals proposal to send to Ton.
  • Continued reading and doing design sketches going over Aligoriths notes ( I have 12 tabs open on his site)
  • Explore some addons and look over the Blender studio workflows as research

23rd

  • Meeting with Nathan V. and Dr. Sybren to pitch my overall direction and current rough draft vision for the animation system.
  • Looking over IK systems and other interaction issues that stand in the way of faster posing.
  • Still reading over and making notes on Aligoriths pose brush and ideas on how the NLA was supposed to work, keying sets, pose brush to replace the need /want for a 3d edit motion path and more


WIP: A way forward

What came from my meetings so far and the rough outline is a goal of clarity and consistency in the animation system and tools that build trust for the animators. They want control and predictability from the tools and the features we build. Having a rig and tools that don't loose data, having UI that doesn't hide away where keyframes are stored and presetting up an Action system to allow for the ability to work sparse, bake dense data or add animation layers and modifiers and work in a non-linear view all is moved forward and is always clear where you are in the creative process.. allowing animators to feel like "I created this, not I ended up with this" We talked about modeling and time topology and sub-division sculpting and re-topology along with code diff/merge control that is missing from animation...bringing us to the other Major part of the forward looking needs of the animation system! Visualization and editing tools that allow you to know and control the final pose (clarity) and being able to edit it in view and reverse solve back to all the places/layers/data buckets that need to be updated to fix the temporal issues. Just like the geometry nodes and code compare let you see what changed, what is influencing the final result our animation system and tools should also. With a Non-linear action manager as the core and heart of the system where you are always in a clip to tools that let you extract and fit and change animation and merge it without loss of important hand edited work from animators to better in view feedback and manipulators to always being able to control the remap/retarget of actions to different rigs or manage rig changes without losing performances... we build trust through these tools and in that the animators can get predictable results that they control and speed up the amount of final animation.

  • 3 hour meeting with Nate to talk over action storage and management, if clarity in the UI and having the core timeline /animation system be IN the NLA state the whole time and evaluate and talk through how other animation management systems seem to work and what we want to keep /what is good about the current action system. We have a follow up meeting to present more concrete examples of what we can start working on beyond just talking about what is need...time to show it.
  • I am starting the documentation of the current issue and making am mock up of what it could be like.

May 11 - 19

Hi, Brad here,Not new, but new here. I am coming on part time as an animation product designer Last week and this one, I have been exploring and getting setup.

  • On boarding: Getting accounts setup and reviewing process documents.
  • Working on testing and finishing up Animation Module NLA tests and exploring some UI tests getting ready for 3.6 release and 4.0 work.
  • Reading over the Action proposal from Nathan https://perm.cessen.com/2023/animation_module/2023_05_04_animation_data_model/#/13
  • Watching Human Rigging from Nathan to review and confirm my current understanding of past workflow design
  • Thinking/notes around rapid editing of dense animation data- Animation as Time Topology and the relationship between sculpt/retopo and Animation keyframe creation and editing as a concept that started while I was at the Blender Conference.

Reading through the Animation System roadmap 2015 and Aligoriths notes on all this

Overall these two weeks have been a deep dive to gather and understand the HOW/WHY things are the way they are and what I can learn from it as I shape my thinking and work to balance the reality of what we have to work with and what needs to be done with what would be nice some day and stay realistic in the goals and ideas for the future of Animation in Blender. More to do.

May 19th-

  • Meeting with Nathan Vegdahl to talk over ideas and understand more about the Action update proposal
  • Talk through ideas and to get on the same page about how this impacts the rest of blender, Overrides, NLA and animation workflow and to help me get a grasp on how to start processing all the new information from the week into my own view/take/vision.
  • More notes on moving upfront the NLA/Layer workflow/Mixing Animaide style animation offset with High level Curve editing and having it all be core to the timeline/animation process vs. a thing you move data in and out of.
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