The Future of Character Animation in Blender

The Blender Conference often serves as a catalyst for Blender's development, marking a period of heightened engagement and discussion over Blender's future. This year, the highlight of this developer/community energy was the Character Animation and Rigging workshop, which took place just before the conference proper, after weeks of meticulous preparation and discussions, and months before that fostering engagement and interest via the weekly module meetings.

New blog post: Looking back at the Character Animation & Rigging workshop. Design principles for a new animation system, to make Blender an attractive animation tool for the next decade.https://t.co/neRQtoagYi#b3d #blender3d #devfund #animation #rigging #bcon22

— Blender Developers ? (@BlenderDev) November 24, 2022

Sybren has shared a massive blog post on the Blender Developers blog detailing the outcome of all these sessions and discussions, and drawing a design map for the potential future of animation in Blender (and beyond!). Here are the 6 design principles that have been established:

FIFIDS:

• Fast: The less you have to wait for Blender, the more creative freedom you have.
• Intuitive: Understandable, predictable tools allow artists to work faster.
• Focused: Activate flow state. Tools should help, not get in the way.
• Iterative: Celebrate exploration, allow people to change their minds.
• Direct: Have interaction & visualisation directly where you need it.
• Suzanne: Be a good Blender citizen.

For an explainer of what each of these principles practically mean and the full picture of what lies ahead, check out the Q&A video done at the Blender Conference and the link to the blog post down below: