New Animation System - Progress Report - Blender Conference 2024

[@ALGHOTTE]

You guys are doing great but I do wish if there were more rigging devs working on Blender to improve it at least to be a good replacement to other Softwares. For Mechanical & Hardsurface stuff Blender does the job as good as them but when it comes to deformed Objects and Character ,then things becomes more difficult, hence why 99% of Blender rigs out there are using mostly Autorgis which are heavy , clumsy and hard to work with for animation. and the worst part is the facial rigs, no proper setup for the eyelids mouth, eyebrows and lips since most of them use either bbones with shapekeys correctives or overload it with constraints and call it done, Facial rigging itself is an art form , and to get emotive facial rigs that we see in feature films and animated shows u need proper setups for each part since each one of them have cetain rules to how it should behave. Sorry about this rant but I just wanted to point out something that I feel heavily missing and maybe encourage someone to look into it... I know you guys are busy and having too much on your plate and tons of requests but the future looks bright.👍

Then join the development force! It's not just software developers that are needed, but also people testing, writing documentation, giving feedback on designs, etc.

[@ALGHOTTE]

Absolutely sir, I'll try my best to help out.

[@alicwz5515]

Maybe dumb question, but how do I do that? Id love to help the blender dev team!!

[@nathanielrupsis2285]

@@alicwz5515 I actually gave a Blender Conference talk on how to do exactly that! Go checkout the "How do I contribute?" talk :)

[@antonioya]

Timeline controls in all editors!!! Thanks!!!

[@Dantti]

Finally! 🎉🎉🎉

[@splitspecs]

Theres an addon on blender extensions for that if you want it now

[@stevenalex-li5mj]

what addon？​@@splitspecs

[@MMAGUY1234]

HOT-KEYS CAN ACCESS THE TIME-LINE IN ALL EDITORS. P=PLAY AND PAUSE , SHIFT+=END OF TIME-LINE.

[@thatcasual8]

@@MMAGUY1234 I think he more specifically means start and end frame controls. I keep a timeline open as the very bottom panel all the time to have access to these.

[@Light.--]

I literally shad a few tears as I've been waiting for so long for some of these features

[@FruitZeus]

I think Rig Nodes is going to be huge.

[@YouTubsel]

This is going to be huge for Blender. I already love what's going to be there in the near future let alone the far (far) future. As soon as this kind of speed also picks up in texture drawing and material creation there won't be much need for other software any more. At least for indies and small teams tehre won't. From a pure employee side of things: Having the power Blender packs in an easy to download package is invaluable. Thanks to everybody involved in this.

[@cristianovi04]

praise blender development team 🙌

[@cristianovi04]

33:48 “we have a bone picker” “thats just an eye dropper” had me LOL

[@wigglepixel]

Amazing work and impressive how you guys really pinpointed most if not all the animation pain points and even seem to have found solutions for those. The future for animating in Blender looks even brighter. Thanks a lot for all the hard work!

[@cas_sim]

Slotted Actions sound like a gigantic game changer for animation in general. I can't believe what I'm hearing, this is incredible. I'm so excited for 4.4 now.

[@andycuccaro]

Thanks for explaining everything about the new system. Can't wait for full-fledged layers, heh!

[@cowbless]

Thank you for your amazing work!!

[@CharonNg]

I'm thrilled about the new animation system. How about if renaming the object the slot's name will follow and vice verse? Maybe add 'sync object name to slot' and 'sync slot name to object' or a check box to sync both.

[@Benn25]

Still no real dynamic parenting? maybe it was one of the features on the "future future" slide, but we need this, like yesterday.

Then come and help building it

[@Benn25]

I know, and I agree. so I spent, I don't even know how many hours to build it. I tried geometry nodes first, kinda working, but the last details made it unusable with several parents, and parenting at the geometry level is a bad idea anyway (need to be at object level). then I tried animation nodes. probably doable, but I wasn't able to figure it out. then I tried to make a plugin with my very limited knowledge of python. chat gpt helped me quite a bit, but still, I wasn't able to get it to work... then when I realized how many weekends of my life I just threw away on that, I decided to quit this quest....for now. the basics are in fact really simple : just need to bake the transform matrix of the object while the time progresses, and this matrix should be multiplied by the matrix of the active parent. the idea is very simple.

@@Benn25 Sounds like you dove into the technical side of things too early. Come up with a great design of how it should work from a user's perspective. See which functionality of Blender would have to change to support that. For example, Blender doesn't animate matrices, it's the individual local location/rotation/scale channels that get keyed. So "simply" baking a matrix is something new, that either should change in the design or in Blender. How would that work? What should change? Those are all important questions that need answering, _way_ before anyone looks at what code needs to change for this.

[@Benn25]

you can also bake translation, rotation and scale separately (that is what I tried in fact) instead of the matrix.

@@Benn25 you're missing my point: if you want Blender to do something, make it super easy for a developer to do what you want them to do.

[@VFXCentral]

Amazing updates! I am so glad I switched to blender! I am trying to convert more people :) already converted 3 people.

[@ahmadabousetta]

Big applause to slotted actions. Thank you.

[@ahmadabousetta]

Interactive story tool and separate physics clock are game changers for me. Thank you.

[@u1over]

Custom bone groups in mini map, please!.. for future you 😊

[@jahjavjaz]

Thank you, developer team. Amazing job

[@FancyFun3433]

Damn I was kinda really hoping for a demo but it's just concepts on a board rn. Also I love that you guys are adding more stuff with the layers workflow. That's exactly what blender needs. Currently I am using empties as animation layers, using the child of constraint. I honestly love the workflow but if I can use the built in animation layers; that would be great. The important part for me is being able to still play the timeline and recording the motion in real time. I currently use empties for that workflow and I am really excited to see if your new animations layers will basically replace that. I don't think it will though because I also use empties to re-position the pivot point also so I don't know XD I am getting away with a lot with the child of constraint. Currently it's my favorite constraint and I hope you guys never touch it lol Also, speaking of the pose library, animation layers, and real-time animation. I hope the new pose library will allow us to record the motion on the timeline as a sort of puppeteer. It would kind of work like Daz3ds puppeteer, only you guys would have animation layers on top of it. I think if you had that it would instantly put you at the top. Currently I enjoy animating in blender more than Maya because Maya can't do real time animation. At least natively, I think there's an addon I can get to make it do it. anything you guys add I hope it can utilize the ability to record the motion as the timeline plays:D I love realtime animation, it's so fast.

[@КонстантинШкода-п7щ]

It would be nice if a constraint was made for the wheel that would allow it to rotate based on the direction of movement

[@thatcasual8]

Some super cool stuff! I'm excited! If an object's shape keys can be incorporated into an action slot, does that mean we will also be able to save shape key data to poses in the pose library?

We still have to think of a way to make multi-slotted Actions work in the pose library. This is definitely a use case to support.

[@coinopanimator]

Some nice ideas. There's some good ideas to be incorporated from the Maya addon Animbot. The way that addon can manipulate keyframes and shape keys is unrivaled and if we could got just some of those it would help to convert Maya animators.

[@Golds_fox]

Great, hope this isnt much to ask but can blender have a hotkey to resize the gizmo like maya

@@Golds_fox "like Maya" -- uhu, and now everybody knows what that means 😆 You mean it has to crash all the time, right? Or be useless without loads of plugins? Joking aside, such functionality (widgets & their functionality) is not for the Animation & Rigging module to implement.

[@Golds_fox]

True that, maya crash alot, 3ds is too slow, but thank to you reminding me about plugin. Someone probably made it, and they did. Godspeed blender team & community

[@pks001]

Good.. But please bring layer based texturing system soon

That's a different team of people, you're asking the wrong crowd ;-)

[@DarrinNoNAME]

Since I’m still fairly new to blender and I don’t really use actions at all, will animation layers rely heavily on actions? Also a lot of the information in this presentation sounds foreign to me. I’m really interested in animation layers and want to know when we can expect a working example demo of it in action. It sounds like all these other examples need to be implemented, before we see a working example of animation layers. Is that correct?

Welcome to Blender! To answer your first question: all animation data is stored in Actions, whether you consiously use them or not. Actions will also hold the animation layers. When it comes to the layered animation, yeah that was presented under the "Future Future" header for a reason ;-)

[@DarrinNoNAME]

Ahhhhh..i see. I think its starting to make sense. I'll watch again to see if I can grasp what's happening. Or better yet, is there a progress thread somewhere to follow this project? On the developer forums or something? By the way, love what you all are doing for the animation development in blender.

[@Ironpants57]

The layered animations is my absolute favorite feature coming out! Currently, having to deal with categorizing names of every rig that interacts with another rig.. Making sure you select the right animations for each rig and objects.. It's going to be so much easier to work on animations with it! So, when are the gltf export settings coming for layered animations? 😏/jk

I was expecting that question from the audience, honestly. The answer: Julien Duroure is working on it, and if things go as planned, glTF support for Slotted Actions will be in Blender 4.4 already. Layered animation, that's the future, so no set Blender version for it yet.

[@Ironpants57]

Oh oops, I meant slotted actions instead. Super hyped for it. However, I'm eagerly waiting for both. Thank you for answering my question! I guess I'll skip to the alpha branch for some tests 😃. I don't mind if there are some bugs and ui changes before the beta release, lol. I'll report any bug I find.

[@zlobzor]

It's good to see blender is catching up with tools that have been around in other tools for years. Chances are Blender will manage to make them rather more resource friendly. And yeah, I don't expect miracles from free software. Blender is fantastic for the price. :)

[@Tertion]

Man, we REALLY need GPU skinning...

[@evanmcarthur478]

41:45 Bringing back some of the elements of the blender game engine?!!

[@Birii23]

I say this as someone who has come to really, really love blender but maya has had animation layers since 2009. Can we just buckle down and make this happen? I’ve been hearing about it for years and it seems like I might not see it until 2029. I know blender’s goal is to remake the wheel for every feature, but what if we had a wheel before we start remaking it? Continue to work, we love blender, but maybe focus on one thing at a time? Spreading your time so thin makes it feel like we’re not really moving anywhere

[@ErsinArt]

They always forget Softimage XSI. XSI already had this in 2004. Packing many animated container in one action layer. Mixing and blending action layers. Adding additional keyframes to an action layer on top without touching the originals. Editing keyframes in an action layer without unpacking. Saving action layers and loading them in another project. It works like a video editor, but with action layers instead of videos. Besides blender, Softimage XSI is still my second tool in 2024. 20 years later.

[@Giantsofearth]

It's so promising and may competetor to maya May in future, blender is the future🥰

[@xox8717]

that's a long long way, Maya under the hood is still powerful especially for character rigging and animation , it's shame that Autodesk didin't upgrade the viewport & the tools to match the current gen tech.

[@LeonardLeon]

I remind you that he stated that they will do absolutely NOTHING worth mentioning right there, in the beginning of the talk. Blender rigging is about a century behind Maya, especially now, when Maya started to have rigging nodes inside the ffucking Bifrost.

[@abdulshabazz8597]

So basically you are offloading (conceptual) implementation constraints onto the user?? Each layer along with its action should be an individual track or node. How to make the user requirements performant -- that's your problem! The user or developer should be allowed to use the UI in an intuitive way, which currently is and always should be based on individual nodes...

[@Wa_Animation]

多个restpose！太需要这个了！！！！

[@Axiasart]

Closing the gap to Maya little by little 😮

[@lematt16]

not even close..but nice upgraded anyway.

[@Tokka-_-0]

Long story short, no animation layers coming anytime soon

[@doodleEeto]

Winter vacation blender 4.3 python mod bucket list: - Rename 'actions' into 'animation strips' - Rename the 'slots' into 'layers' - Remove the push down and the stash button. And the search bar in the modifiers menu. It's a yearly tradition. - Through sheer hatred force blender to generate motion path every frame - Remove or change fake user button icon. No reason, just personal bias - Witchhunt a person who added the search bar to the modifiers menu in his dreams 👻

[@sebbosebbo9794]

a lot od ppl. love the Searchbar ... ppl. voted hopped for years .. whats the problem ??

[@jbdh6510]

I love the searchbar and the new modifier menu. You can install an add-on to have the old one

[@clonkex]

What's wrong with the fake user button?

[@Bahamamos]

Seems like this also could make machine learning into Blender way swifter lol. I don't know where or why, but can assume it'll run through faster with a more optimal source to utilize.

[@Wakeup-work-ki1lp7mt4d]

Sir will ai replace 3d artist please clarify sir 🙏 please 🙏

[@Ydstyle.713]

My one question is AI is future for animation so what human animation skills is need

[@GarviHere]

No it's east

[@BoboTheImp]

@@GarviHere Am I having a stroke?

[@ReceiveMusic]

Without human artists, AI would have nothing to STEAL from.

[@Axiasart]

😂only brain dead people can believe ai is the future for animation how could they be the future if they can only do what is already done 😂😂

[@minerkey682]

if you want to use AI in your animation, you can go to cascadeur. But AI is often trained off human-made content such as animation, so there will always need to be tools to facilitate human beings making animation