Apologies if this has already been posted, but in reading most related discussions I don’t think I’ve seen it mentioned that the project has been delayed to 2022.
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1261630324141953028
https://twitter.com/tonroosendaal/status/1261677128099205122
[edited to add his second post on the topic]
The video he’s referring about maya student license not available anymore is a great opportunity for Blender to make new users adopt it though.
it’s ok for me ,blender animation and rigging system it’s pretty solid and one of the best in the industry
He shouldn’t have tweeted those, he should have said " we weclome everyone who wish in joining & helping us in improving Blender" you know marketing stuff instead of giving Autodesk 2 years of free time & indirectly saying we don’t welcome Maya’s Animators in our side.
Some polite disagreement.
I think it’s good strategy having clear and honest communication with users. It’s a decent way to prevent the frustration that comes with people expecting features which aren’t on the horizon.
Also, maybe and hopefully, it communicates to a larger audience (and in particular, devs & studios) that more help is needed to tackle the animation project anytime sooner.
It’s all in the marketing, i know that honest communication is good but this is the point where you actually ask for more support, users,studios…etc it’s not different from saying we need you in our side to achieve that goal but anyway we’ll see how this strategy works out .
I agree it would have been nice to have paired those messages with a call for assistance, but I understand if they’re waiting for other projects to stabilize (like performance issues) before tackling another large and dependant task.
Also, I was curious why they don’t have feature-specific campaigns more often and sorta found an answer. Thought others might have missed this as well. From: https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/AskUsAnything
Why can’t we donate money for specific features?
A: While individual developers have accepted donations/payment for their developments before, this is not something any organizations have been interested to do this so far… Along with this risk, it means developers end up being locked into a plan which we can’t modify without possibly upsetting some of the supporters. (even when it makes sense to revise plans) .
All that said, feature specific crowd funding has been shown to work, and individual developers are free to use online services to accept donations.
[shortened the answer, more of an explanation in the link]
I’m curious what are those “higher priority tasks”. Would it be an architectural change? Getting rid of modality would be a cool idea, it’s such an annoying concept. Or maybe a C++ API…
Blender development happens dynamically, animation improvement can happen. If new users are waiting for animation 2020 or animation 2022 to jump into Blender they are making a huge mistake, I can count many parts of Blender that are working great now but people have been using them in somehow chaotic state ( multires. for ex.).
Developers usual want to see clearly what is not working, for them to improve it, and usually it takes time.
Lets encourage users who are still hesitating to jump into Blender to do so, because together we are stronger.
O’ #b3d brethen where art thy fanboy-ism?
What you suggest is that not being able to complete daily tasks is “making a huge mistake”. What we should encourage users to do is to use the software that can get the job done.
Open it up, what do you mean by not being able to complete a daily task? Note that they are people who are using Blender animation system and i know is not perfect, but they can complete a daily task.
Ton’s tweet is referring to this article :
2.8 is a big refactor of Blender.
Before thinking about improving workflow about 2.8 design, you need to finish 2.8 design.
They have to make Library overrides, Animation playback, Scene Editing, Asset manager, a solid basis.
And as long as animation workflow will not be satisfying, a solid Alembic/USD import/export has to be there.
So, although 2020 targets are not related to animation system or animation editors, they are animation oriented.
Probably, there will be sporadic improvements for animators in releases that will occur in 2020, 2021.
But maybe, no dev will be available to focus on the whole animation workflow before 2022.
For example, we will have a glance of what could look like modifier nodes and constraint nodes with introduction of particle nodes in 2.9.
A intermediate import/export should ALWAYS be there, no matter what 3D application you use.
NO 3D application will become the ‘one fits all’ at studios, that’s a utopian idea.
Having proper ways to shuffle data around is key, not just for assets, but also for scene building, lighting & rendering.
It has become my experience that developers are quick to ignore suggestions, even well thought out feature requests (including lots of examples).
It is often quickly dismissed as user error or ‘by design’. The ability to ignore everything that’s on the other side of the fence still amazes me, even after I started fiddling with 2.8 beta…
If you want to change things, you will have to bring a LOT of other people along, in combination with a well though out and explained plan. Maybe then, you have a shot at changing certain things…
And if you want to have a proper shot, go to the dev forum directly, you have the best chance of being notice by the more professional user base.
There is a good level of truth on what you are saying but let not generalize, For example sculpt mode is having a lot good workflow oriented features, now we have decent collection system. But with in animation department things have been slow since @Aligorith ( devs who has implemented the Blender animation system) has been inactive, yes there is someone in charge now but for the person to get his head around the system, it is taking time. What we need for the Blender animation system is a " Pablo for animation" then our request would not be ignored.
Agree we need Pablo second generation and we need it now😂
It might be a bit generalizing, but I feel that the regular users are often fix basic things in Blender, that should be the part of the devs themselves.
e.g. the Outliner, a frustration for many users for a long time, with countless suggestions trickled in rightclick and the developers forum. This should not be a GSOC item for a 3rd party programmer (as talented as he is), but a internal task.
It’s not sexy enough I guess, and there’s a lot of other things that should get more love from the devs.
Like proper asset management, which is for me quite baffling that after all these in-house projects there’s still nothing there. But there are 3rd party countless projects on GitHub showing that with some love, something amazing can be done here for everyone.
But you get the/my point I guess. 
Yes, I got to your point. One thing i have learn since i have been following Blender development is development time. The time to have a good feature in the FLOSS world is pretty long. We have to wait, if you subjectively follow Blender development you should agree with me. It happens like this because of many vectors, most people will think is money, but my observations have shown me that there are many others factors. Among other developer’s motivation, does the community support this feature, one of the very big slow down of software development with a big project on size of Blender, code maintenance, courage to break things in order to have a new fresh start, …
Taking the example of the outliner is actually a good starting point that explain what i have mentioned above. @Aligorith had worked on it, Severin worked on it and Dalai touched here and there, last year Nathan with GSOC brought us many other features, for a better workflow.
Multires modifier is another example: Bishop worked on and left, Psy-fi did some and left as well, Campbell, Brecht, Bastian, Dr Sergey( i m a big fan LOL) are maintaining here and there, and now we have Pablo is a sculptor developer who is polishing for a better workflow. The all process took like 10 years.
For animation we need people to show out there this is what is missing, this is what is broken. I m pretty sure if people are posting there animations workflow, showing again and again what and where is the problem, if the core developers don’t fix it, a miracle will happen, for sculpt mode the miracle name is Pablo.
Damn, i didnt even know Ton communicates through twitter. If i didnt stumbled upon this thread by chance, i never would have picked up that they postponed the 2020 poject to 2022. One would think that this information is important enough to mention it at least in one of Pablo’s video blogs.
Which brings me to another request dear Blender Foundation:
STOP SCATTER AROUND BLENDER NEWS ALL OVER THE INTERNET! How hard can it be to centralize info through one channel. I dont give a damn which one, just pick one site and go with it.
I’m getting tired to check 10 sites on a daily basis to keep myself up to date with important development news.
Sorry about that little rant there, but that postponement of the 2020 project just got to me. I’m in the same boat as Artur_Wieczorek, thinking about changing pipeline to Blender for upcoming pojects. Right now Blender seem to be far far away to be taken seriously. Felinto seem to be a nice guy but that may be the problem. As a project coordinator, i’m just not sure if he’s up to the task. I wish they hire someone who brings some structure in this chaos.
Was pretty much inevitable that Animation 2020 would be postponed. Did people not see the huge list of stuff planned this year like performance, an asset manager, Everything Nodes, sculpting improvements, etc., etc.? There is absolutely no way that animation tools would take priority when there are already so much to do and fix.
They have an official blog on the main website. If you want pretty much all the info you need, you can just use this link: https://code.blender.org/