The Future of Character Animation & Rigging: a Q&A feeback session

[@FesNaqvi]

Holy snap! Animation legend Jason Schleifer is on the Blender train!??? LET'S FREAKING GO!

[@jschleifer]

There are a bunch of wonderful people participating in the module with an incredible breadth of knowledge and passion - it’s very exciting!

[@mrxyz5325]

The Future is Blender

[@ClintochX]

👌

[@cedricvillani8502]

But still no 😂 still need Maya and 3DS/Nuke etc… Not to mention Volumetric Capture

[@Tremori_A]

But still yes

[@FruitZeus]

This is absolutely game changing. Rigging Nodes and a redesign of animation tools aren’t just making our workflows better, but these new tools are in fact changing the way we even think about and approach animated projects.

[@apoclypse]

Well they don't exist yet. When they actually get implemented then we can talk about how they are game changing. The BF talks a good game but we have plenty of examples of things not coming to fruition. Animation 2020 being one. Some I'm skeptical for now until I see some actual code getting checked in and the final product looking even remotely like what they showed here.

[@hariabburu2807]

@@apoclypse that was because of covid

[@redjam9]

It is so refreshing to see these kind of conceptual discussions happening well before development happens. Especially encouraging to see industry heavyweights from outside of the Blender distortion field like Jason and Brad to help steer development. Would really like to see this sort of collaboration happening with other aspects of Blender like sculpting/painting and motion graphics!

[@RobertFletcherOBE]

Your legally discouraged from doing it with commercial software. If a company is publicly traded then announcing 'features' affects the stock price. I do kind of worry about this for blender too, you can be sure allot of the audience is now expected the exact ideas expressed in the talk, rather than being hopeful that these ideas can be realized. Rigging nodes is very achievable and has been done before, where as some of the other features have not, and may not actually be practical. We'll have to wait and see :)

[@dronemaArt]

Wonderful talk! Very excited for the future of rigging and animation in Blender!

[@MatteoDiLena]

Really good to see Brad Clark and Jason Schleifer involved in this project :) Looking forward to see how this develops over the next few years

[@BlenderDefender]

@Blender Timestamps: 0:00 Intro 3:40 Core Principles 4:19 Fast 8:27 Intuitive 15:05 Focused 16:59 Iterative 20:12 Direct 24:27 Suzanne 26:51 The Givens & Next Steps 30:15 Q&A

[@bigboss9150]

Wow... This will definitely change (for the better) the way character animators will complete and work their projects. The fact that you are focusing on intuitiveness and freedom of exploration makes it very exciting to animate in Blender.

[@blanchsb]

Best talk of the day! I really enjoyed seeing the vision and excited to try these concepts as they release them

💜

[@paolaanimator]

I'm so happy Blender is getting updates for rigging and animation, I'm a 3D animator who likes using Blender. I've been using the pose library and it has already helped save me so much time with character animation so I'm really looking forward to these updates!

[@Bo-kq8tn]

it is SO exciting to hear about VR development, I've dreamed of posing being as intuitive as grabbing something and moving it with my actual hands!

[@INVICTUSSOLIS]

love this because I need all the help I can get on this self teaching journey

[@andrekling]

that was awesome, very hopeful for the future...

[@activemotionpictures]

11:21 - THANK YOU SIR! YES! THIS IS IT!!

[@thomasburbage5450]

Really looking forward to all of this coming together in implementation. So good to see Brad and Jason being willing to invest their time into all of this, and thanks for Sybren for leading. I think the focus on direct, performant, in-viewport interactivity is the key to a great, creative user experience in all areas of 3D, but is critical for Blender to be seen as a great place to animate.

[@thomasburbage5450]

Oh, and I loved seeing a quick mention of "personal mocap", or using emerging VR/related controls to be able to create one's own motion clips. Mocap and integration of mocap libraries and data was not discussed, but I think being able to nicely apply motion clips onto characters, and then "hand" animate on top of that is very important.

[@abraxops]

really excited for the future of this module, a lot of exciting things to look forward to. great presentation guys!

[@johannleo1282]

This is just amazing, I am so happy to see how much effort and talent is put into thinking up what looks like the best potential animation system available. Good job! Super excited to follow this project and can't wait to transition my studio to a Blender animation workflow

[@sams_3d_stuff]

Blender never ceases to amaze

[@slamotte]

I'm so excited to try these as they come out, that you for your dedication

[@mixchief]

Wow. Stoked. Blender. ❤

[@yannterrer]

Ok at 13:44, even if Rigging isn’t a part of your everyday workflow, you know that it is Huge ! What a Team and an Intense Bcon;)

[@fakecubed]

Enthusiastic crowd for this one! I don't blame them. This is some exciting stuff. I have been largely turned off from rigging in Blender because of how crazy unintuitive it seems. Give me Everything Nodes!

[@samgoldwater]

Argh, so exciting!! What a pleasure to watch this

[@GloriaTheAnimator]

just please make sure these riggs will work well with other engines like unreal and unity, its important for the models to be usable outside of blender if we want blender to become the industry standard

[@xox8717]

This is the missing part for blender, rigging & animation. once it get to a good level to compete with the rest, it could really get blender to take off for even higher heights.

[@itazenin]

can we get much higher

[@tonibuenavida]

awesome! fingers crossed to see this finished! game changer!

[@sajjadabouei6721]

Big scary visions Hope them best 🎉🎉🎉

[@YouTubsel]

Oftentimes I am a little sceptical of some of the directions being taken. And yes I also know that many of these things will change or be different or may even be scrapped. But I agree on everything that ways said. The general vision for how these things should look is absolutely fantastic and makes me have even more faith in the developers' decisions. Bein open is just great and you can absolutely see that they will try to produce the best thing with all of this. Really wished more companies would do this.

[@josephbrandenburg4373]

🥳🤯 Awesome work!

[@riccardorussi-art]

Will a system for building muscle be developed? It would be great to be able to quickly build controls for origin and insertion, dynamics and collisions for muscle mass and tendons.

Likely not directly. But having Blender suited for the ability to create such a system (like with an add-on) will be on our minds when designing new ways of working.

[@ArtVandelayInc]

I would like to know if there will be some work about drag and drop import FBX functionality and a better FBX support overall. Right now, from Blender to game engines transitions pretty much depend on the FBX for character animation. Like, to be able to export distance curves with the animations would be great for the pipeline. It's a closed source thing so I understand it would be really challenging but still I wanted to ask. And it was a great presentation by the way!

Thanks! That would be for the Pipeline, Assets & IO module though, and not the Animation & Rigging module.

[@pauliusmscichauskas558]

Here is an idea: A whole new editor, dedicated for putting rig controllers in a 2D space. So, freely placed 2D shapes, sliders, number inputs and so on. A character image can be used under the controllers. So, for example, you can have a characters face, and adjust some controls from there...

[@algerian_tiger5252]

I think rigging in blender is the one that needs more work especially for facial rigs, Maya has some really nice rigs from power users with even resources on how to build them from scratch ,unlike blender that mostly rely on auto rigs since bones are bit tricky to use for faces, the setup is complicated and the results are not so good....just take a quick peek at the way mouth corners deform in either examples and you'll see the difference. take a look at "Deformation Layering in Maya's Parallel GPU World"...many other examples too on who to achieve better facial deformations with less controls

[@blenderblender792]

I figured it out! I wish for a new animation panel, an all in 1 animation panel. The need to put different info and different keyframes for timing into 1 overall view is a very important feature for any animator. In a new animation properties you can tick on what you wish to combine into 1 timeline. You can choose what is on the header, what keyframes to view and what background to view such as the soundwave pattern.

[@ageofgar]

Animation updates Let's GOOOO !!! 😆😆😆

[@BarzuIbrohimov]

At this rate, I don't think we'll be waiting for 2025 in order to have cool stuff. I'm sure we'll have them piece by piece throughout the years, Blender is evolving so rapidly like no other software, Things are getting so much better. Thanks for the team. And yeah, animation system I guess is the place where biggest changes shoud be made ))

[@pshethia01]

Some AI software will destroy everything..

[@ihatetomatoees]

⁠@@pshethia01hello sir this is from Microsoft tech support

[@aaayerus]

One thing I really wanted to see completely revamped is Blender physics system, and maybe integrated with the rigging system, so they work optimally.

[@USBEN.]

Damn i love open source communities.

[@Taldisuiskai]

cant wait to se node editor implement for rigging!

[@rontarrant]

It occurs to me that what this sub-group of devs could do is talk to the Cascadeur people. Get them to bring their rigging/animation stuff into the Blender fold. Yes, they're Russians and everyone's down on the Russian government right now, but these guys are artists, non-combatants who are not taking part in the war (AFAIK), and they've got some very interesting ideas.

[@jaye6612]

my next favorite talk in teh confrence, also I like the rigging nodes addon, but the content I see for it online get outdated very fast, and its a bit more challenging to get into

[@SaintMatthieuSimard]

Awesome!

[@mauree1618]

Let’s go. 👏

[@adilmehmood2915]

Blender will soon take over the world. Its da people's power

[@thelawgameplaywithcommenta2654]

Let's goooo!!!

[@GarviHere]

Auto Rig Pro taking notes furiously

[@sergemo4607]

Great conference, the Q&A section needs improvement because we can't hear the questions. And some speakers are using microphones to respond. But overall great talk.

[@phuongnganinh4634]

I am a hard fan of Blender ! 7 years has gone!

[@buda3d2007]

The character animation of Blender being streamlined to what they have planned will allow me to fully move across to Blender, its thie 25yo animation system that has held Blender back, nodes allow for so much more control with the ability for it to be non-destructive.

[@TigreDemon]

Mmh, I started learning animation those last few weeks in Blender, so I'm wondering what it's gonna look like !

[@dixie_rekd9601]

I would kill for good vr posing and animation. Vr in blender has amazing potential as a creative tool

[@buda3d2007]

More over they will take a start from scratch approach to the system, instead of trying to jerry rig the old way to work with the new way.

[@ashwithullal]

When do we get to see animbot type functionality in Blender

See 25:55 ;-)

[@AdamWParkerDotCom]

46:00 yessir!

[@FancyFun3433]

Hey while you guys are at it and because I will be the 45th comment. You guys should give me *access to all 3 X Y and Z controls*. I want to be able to move objects on *all coordinates*, while *playing the timeline* to practice *real time animation*. *Real time animation* is the art of grabbing the object, pressing play on the timeline with auto key on, and moving the object in the exact way you want it to move. Sounds weird but trust me I realllly want it. You can *change the frame rate to slowdown the animation* so that you can keep up with the other parts of the animation.... Which is *REALLY powerful* because it lets you kind of feel the motion of everything in real time... turn the frame rate back up and boom you have a quick animation

[@FancyFun3433]

If you want an example there's already a program with this feature called Tvori. There's a video called, "Create Pixar Films in VR!" by Disrupt. Around 1:48 he introduces Tvori with the ability to move objects on all 3 axises and you can slow down the animation so you can keep adding to it in real time. It's amazing and blender can do it... Minus moving the object freely on XY and Z....

[@FancyFun3433]

Like seriously PLEASE!!! I have been messing with realtime animation for a bit now and I know it can be REALLLY powerful... I REALLLLLLLY wanna mess with it. I'm so desperate for this I am learning to code so I can make a plugin for it ....(;___;) and I suck at code....

[@FancyFun3433]

ALSO that feature you guys have called DELTA transforms is REALLY awesome for realtime animation. But I can't use it in pose mode which sucks! Because it's like a quick and dirty animation layer....

[@FancyFun3433]

ALSO ALSO DAZ3D Has this awesome tool called the puppeteer tool and it makes animating really a lot of fun!

[@kasper7203]

I really should learn to use nodes

[@JasonCunliffe]

41:14 👍👍👍 what he is saying about time, control, workflow, creative context // graph editor and beyond = is so right Time & Animation Modifiers × Nodes ☯️ 🎯 Up to 46:24 /and applause

[@GENIUSGT]

Finally, Blender's animation UI and hotkeys have been shit for too long. Hopefully, it'll be like Maya's.

[@RobertFletcherOBE]

If you make rigging faster riggers will just make more complex rigs :D

[@kasper7203]

Hope blender stays new peep friendly and not catered to professionals.

[@davidrozier1126]

"G means move, you use it everywhere." Wellll, almost. G is not intuitive for Object and Pose Mode

[@leonardoromero4709]

I always thought that "G" means grab

@@leonardoromero4709 it does

[@FelixtheBrown]

G means "Go somewhere else" 😁

[@davidrozier1126]

@@leonardoromero4709 xD technically yes, but it\s not called grab in the keymap. It's called move

[@GarviHere]

This addresses why I'm so slow

[@inknpaintCW]

Glen Keane reference - 50 points

[@The3Dsmash]

The priorities are off, in my opinion. I've worked as a character animator (in Maya) for 15 + years, and for me, the response regarding the Graph Editor @40:51 was dismissive, tone-deaf, and deeply disappointing. In essence, The Blender development team sees the Graph Editor is a diagnostic last resort that should take a back seat to fast, viewport based hands on animation. Sounds great. But professional character animators use the GE and Dopesheet A LOT. Fast feedback in the viewport is awesome. But the way we adjust, finesse and retime performances after initial posing breakdowns is to extensively work on keys and curves in the Graph Editor and Dopesheet. Blender acolytes and fanboys may be enthusiastic about this talk of creativity over fear of messing up the "spaghetti curves", but as professional who makes a living using the Graph Editor (95% of my day is spent in Maya's graph editor and anim layers), this is a huge red flag. What Blender needs in order to compete with Maya + animBot in the character animation sphere, are comparable tools that allow animators to quickly manipulate keys and curves in the Graph Editor, Timeline, Dopesheet. As someone who enjoys playing in Blender and would love to actually do some character animation work in Blender as well, I had high hopes for the future of the animation tools in the software. But this misplaced emphasis on mesh based selection/posing and rigging while downplaying key and curve manipulation tools and Graph Editor innovations mean professional 3D animators like me simply cannot commit fully to Blender for their work.

[@bradclark5686]

Feel free to join us in the meetings or share the must have improvements to the graph editor that you would like to see. The focus to allow more work directly in the viewport and communicate months of work and focus on the future, not matching animbot feature list is what the video was about. It doesn't mean that the core tools to improve the work for people that need the editor won't happen either, but if you have clear ideas on what "improving the graph editor" would look like user involvement is what the main point of the video was. Get excited or interested or in this case frustrated and then do something about it. Brad - dismissive of the graph editor- Clark :)

[@GarviHere]

43:19 THIS!!!! Finally. I thought I was the only one...

[@mussadiqzainal7084]

Auto IK.. off on toggle 🤔🤷🏻😄

[@JohnJewel]

Ebsynth

[@RDD87z]

you know what is weird.. 2022, with 5 or more being in the market, and theres still not a useful tool for animating or modeling with VR in blender... at least if there is. there are no tutorials about blender xr.

[@drpepa09]

Ai sorting Repotology in a click ? Is that coming

[@genkidama7385]

when your only goal in life is to clone houdini features and make it look like it is some sort of innovation.

[@pinx5976]

why should blender implement features other 3d-software has already? because b3d as a 3d-tool is lagging behind the standard of usability + possibilities of more developed 3d-software!!!!!

[@enjoyenjoy5721]

Could you please work on making Blender more Mac friendly? I bought a MBP M1 with 32 ram for music. But also use and learn Blender, but can't even use my $4K machine with Blender.