Yeah this guy is absolutely providential. I am so grateful for the armature constraint and the bbone improvements. Mad props to you sir Gavrilov.
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With this commit by Sergey
https://developer.blender.org/rB2a354dd4bde05614f5cd67235edd0463d22d26c4
Graph editor and dope sheet no more crashes
By move and scale key frames
Finally animation is here in blender 2.8
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Can anybody explain what an armature constraint is?
Yeah, I would like to know as well.
Yes, finally! Though there still seems to be the weirdness with the actions, which makes animation really clunky in many cases… (if this commit is in the latest experimental 2.8 build at blender.org?)
By weirdness I mean e.g. this example:
- new file
- animate the location of the default cube (-> now it has an action)
- clear the loc keyframes (-> cube still moves in animation, even though the action is empty…?)
- move the cube (-> cube doesn’t move in animation anymore)
- assign the previous, empty action to the cube again (-> the location property seems to still change with the animation, even though the cube isn’t moving in the viewport and there’s no keyframes…?)
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Working with Bendy Bones should now come with better performance.
https://developer.blender.org/rB1e820898ff4dfc734710a6640ca7bafc0bfc69db
Again, the same guy as most of the other commits.
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He is a monster working on animation development for blender, holy hell…
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This makes me think how good would it be to have a “B-Bone Child constraint” that takes the B-bone curvature into consideration when applying transforms to a child bone of it.
Right now if you create a child of a B-bone, add segments and ease-in and ease-out to the b-bone, then move/rotate the bone before or after the B-bone, the curvature of the b-bone will change, but it’s child bone will remain static as if ignoring the form changes happening to the B-bone.
EDIT: Alexander answered, and said it is already possible on 2.8:
“The new Armature constraint can be used like that. Copy Transforms also now sees the full transform of the segments”
He came in the right time!! This guy is a gift right now for the blender animations system
Maybe animation 2020 it’s much closer then what we think
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The “non-replace” mode in the NLA editor (which allows you to layer tweaks on top of the base animation) now works properly.
https://developer.blender.org/rBde662e7cd3b3ca45c4220e3830c32e2b3496c9fe
To be fair, this feature isn’t “new”, but the way it manipulated keyframes made it nearly useless for practical purposes. This commit makes it into something actually usable for some forms of animation layering.
10 Likes
The “monster adjective” coms from a background of doing… what exactly?
Did the same guy just add animation layering in Blender ? Just like that ?
i hope so,blender need a dedicated developer for the animation system
Alexander Gavrilov has come in the right time
And fortunately, Brecht agrees. Note the patch thread and how he decided not to wait for Aligorith’s input before committing it.
That should not be seen as a knock against Aligorith as he has produced many good features for the animation system over the years, if only he could more easily find the time.
this makes me so happy. I’d coded my own hack-y add-on to handle basic animation tweak layers because the 2.79 additive mode was so unusable on its own. thrilled that this is now properly supported. a huge xmas gift!
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I made an Additive Layers addon for 2.7x before any official plans were even hinted at (with interactive mode).
I was going to ask how this worked because I was trying it and nothing was different but I was using a version from Dec 7, just updated it to Dec 16 and the additive layers work in 2.8.
I was planning migrate my system to 2.8 with my other personal stuff but now it looks like I can snip it entirely, since it’s builtin now 
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Another massive upgrade for the nla editor
By Alexander gavrilov
- NLA blending of rotation now used proper interpolation of quaternions. Another step towards making the NLA work well in production.
https://developer.blender.org/rBS57d4b869be387767be51fe1f9d819904c342d692
https://developer.blender.org/rBS3ff132492da18b3f6e9eb411100692814de4e155
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this is great! they’re addressing every pain point I encountered on the last project I did 
mmm, tl;dr
New NLA Blend Mode:
Replace / Add / Subtract / Multiply / [Overlay] .
He fixed keyframe insertion for the animation system already available, now seems to start adding parameters “intended” for proper additive animation layers.
Don't know C but I'm looking at the code for this blend mode:
I assume that while Add/Subtract/Multiply can fail to work properly sometimes (because of the straightforward math they use, requiring lower layers as a reference), Overlay can work on it’s own like Replace, and it can automatically merge with other layers.
But that’s just my guess, I can’t confirm until several hours when the build-bot updates (because I don’t like the hassle of building)
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