The Animation & Rigging module presented the progress and future plans for Animation 2025, at Blender HQ. This blog post describes that presentation.

Related posts:

• The Future of Character Animation
• Animation Workshop: June 2023

by Sybren Stüvel & Nathan Vegdahl

1. The DreamWhere do we want to go with Blender? These desires stem directly from the workshops linked above.

Multiple animated and strongly interacting characters, with a prop. Cosmos Laundromat (2015), Blender Studio.We want to be able to keep animation of related characters / objects together, in one “Animation” data-block. This should include those constraints that are specific to the shot. That will make tightly coupled animation, like Frank, Victor, and the rope above, easier to manage.

Screenshot of Blender, showing the Rig Nodes prototype.We want to have rigging nodes. Given the desire to keep shot-dependent constraints with the animation data for that shot, it’s likely that these will be somehow implemented with a new rigging nodes system.

Mockup of what a bone picker could look like, showing Ellie from Sprite Fright (2021).We want to have a system for bone pickers, so that animators can work faster and with a less cluttered 3D viewport.

And there are lots more ideas. Example-based drivers, multiple rest poses per rig, custom bone axes, editable motion paths, ghosting (also editable, of course), animation retargeting tools, dense animation workflow, tools for wrangling motion capture data, the list goes on.

So these are all ideas that we would love to do for Animation 2025. All by 2025?!? (To be clear: no, that’s not possible with only 2.2 FTE in paid developers). Well, let’s stop dreaming, step back, and look at…

1. The ConcreteSo far the Animation 2025 project has already brought many improvements to Blender.

— Already in BlenderThe features listed below are all already in Blender or will be released in Blender 4.1:

12x faster graph editor in Blender 4.0 (in this case, compared to Blender 3.6, YMMV).

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Blender 4.0 replaced the limited armature layers system with the more powerful bone collections, with nesting and more visibility options coming to Blender 4.1.

Many of the Animaide tools were brought to Blender natively. And there is more:

• Camera-relative motion paths
• Keying workflow improvements
• Weight paint mode selection tools
• “View in Graph Editor” on any property
• Copy Global Transform
• Configurable bone relationship lines
• “Parent” transform space
• New F-Curve smoothing operators
• NLA is now fairly usable
• Multi-editing of F-Curve modifiers
• Bendy Bones better bendyness

— What we’re working on right nowCurrently the Animation & Rigging module is working on a new layered animation system: Project Baklava. Why this name? Everybody knows that Baklava consists of two ingredients: layers, and deliciousness. And with ‘deliciousness’ we actually mean ‘Multi-ID animation’.

These two, Layers and Multi-ID animation, form the two pillars for a new animation system. More technical details of this system are described in Animation Workshop: June 2023.

The system itself will just be “Blender’s animation system” in the future. Baklava is the project name.

Mock-up of what the new layered animation system could look like, by Nathan Vegdahl.The above mock-up shows what this new animation system could look like. Two characters, the monster and Bob, are animated from the same Animation data-block. This means that trying out alternative takes for the same animation no longer requires swapping out multiple Actions; instead it can just be done by (un)muting different layers in the animation.

Nathan made a lot of UI/UX designs, including venturing into some further-future topics like animation-level constraints and swappable rigs. To see these designs in more detail, visit Initial UX design for the new Animation data model on Blender Projects.

Working Animation data-block, animating two separate objects at once. Very much a developer-only GUI at this point.In the mean time, Sybren has been working on implementing the data model. It consists of the Animation data-block, which is intended to replace the Action. At this moment the DNA and RNA code are present, and evaluation and simple mixing of layers works too. And, as you can see above, it can animate multiple objects simultaneously.

— Next Step for Project BaklavaThe goal is to get this into animators’ hands as soon as possible. For this, a few things are still necessary:

• Make it possible to key things. The above animation was made via Python, which is suboptimal.
• Show the animation in the dopesheet & graph editor. This is relatively simple (famous last words), as the new Animation data-model still uses the same F-Curves. Any tool that can work with those could work with the new Animation as well.
• Just ~~deliciousness~~ Multi-ID, no layers yet. To keep the feedback loop as small as possible, we decided to focus on the biggest unknown first. And since we already have a decent idea about how layers should work, Multi-ID animation is prioritised.

— Further StepsOnce the Multi-ID animation is in, the efforts will shift towards more tooling, and layered animation.

• Migration tools: for merging multiple Actions into a single Animation. Or to bake down an Animation data-block into an Action per animated object.
• A new editor for layered animation. At first this will likely be a side-panel for the dopesheet. In the longer term, it should be an editor by itself that ideally can replace the entire dopesheet.
• Tools for merging & splitting: animators should be able to “play” with layers. It should be easy to split up layers by object, merge them down, split selected F-Curves off into a separate layer, etc.

• Tools for baking: it should be possible to tweak an animation by adding one or more layers on top, then bake that layer down while keeping the same animation.

• The Management“Make Blender ready for the next decade!” was Ton Roosendaal’s missive for the Animation 2025 project. Exploring this was a lot of fun, and brought us many great ideas (see 1. The Dream above). To keep things manageable, this is our proposal:

• Keep the umbrella goal of futurifying Blender’s animation & rigging systems.

• Rename what we’re doing now to “Project Baklava“. This reduces the work to a significantly smaller, and hence easier to manage, project with concrete steps & deliverables.
• Prioritise other “umbrella projects” as we go.

— The PlanningAs we wrote above, one project at a time. Now it’s Baklava. We aim for inclusion in the main branch as an experimental feature in Q2 2024. The first ‘working state’ will be single-layer, multi-ID animation. After that we might add layers, but maybe we’ll switch to bone pickers or rigging nodes. The point is: we don’t have to wait until Animation 2025 is “done” to refocus and work on what is most needed at the time.

Stay in the LoopKeep an eye on the Animation & Rigging module meeting notes. These are the best source of information of current development and decision making. Or maybe even join a meeting?