First, congratulations everyone on the Annie award and on all the years of hard work, at my current job i got animators crying to learn blender (which i'll help them with), it makes me very proud to be part of this community and see how far it's gone, cant imagine where it'll take us.
Okay so GSOC proposal. *VIewport caching for animation playback.* - *Benefits*: Giving animators the tools to make animation better and faster, the faster you can see in the viewport, the more you can iterate, the more you can iterate the better you can work, the more you can improve. Directly the benefit to the users is playing one or several characters in realtime in the viewport even if they are heavy in polygons, this with the power of the workbench engine for visualization will reduce the ammount of "playblasts" made while doing animation and also give the possibility to see what's going on around the character not only in the one perspective where the playblast is made from. This will hugely improve the animation workflow, I think at the end of the day what every animator wants is rigs that play realtime every time. - *Description*: for the user in the viewport basically there should be just a button to turn on and off, with a sub-button to flush cache in case that's needed. It should basically work like the prefetch that is being done for the vse, with a bar drawn in the timeline describing what frames have been cached. - *Requirements*: should be non intrusive and automatic, (the idea is not to add extra steps or work for the user, but on the contrary make it as invisible as possible) it would happen in the background and with optional way to "force" recaching for when that's necessary. - *Difficulty*: One of the main difficulty and concerns is that if i move a part of the rig the cache doesnt get invalidated completely, just the affected frames, in example i have 100 frames and i tweak an eye of my character that only affects 5 frames of the timeline, after i let go the eye control those 5 frames should be recached not the entire range of frames. - *Possible mentors*: i guess sybren could be the ideal mentor since he's been working other kinds of caching (?) To finalize, this idea has been around the industry for years, Premo (dreamworks animation software) has this same system since pre how to train your dragon time ~2014, pixar's presto also features it via their USD and its render engine Hydra, and maya 2019 recently acquired this feature (that's when i first got a taste hands on of it), and for the animation process it is a game changer. all my love, L Luciano A. Muñoz Sessarego Web: www.pintamonos.cl Email: [email protected] Vimeo: www.vimeo.com/lucianomunoz Gumroad: https://gumroad.com/lucianomunoz Imdb: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm8355386/ Linkedin: http://www.linkedin.com/in/lucianomunoz Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lucianomunoz _______________________________________________ Bf-committers mailing list [email protected] https://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
