Reference/Release Notes/4.1/Animation Rigging

Animation & Rigging

Bone Collections

Screenshot of the Bone Collections in the Outliner in Blender 4.1

Bone Collections are now hierarchical (129fb2eab8). The collections are shown in a tree instead of a flat list, where they can be rearranged and nested via drag-and-drop. The outliner also shows the bone collection hierarchy (2e2b5dcd52).

Screenshot of the Bone Collections panel in Blender 4.1

Visibility is determined by the bone collection itself, and its ancestors: a bone collection is only visible when its parent, grandparent, etc. are visible (6cfbf9ef2f). In other words: hiding a bone collection will also hide its children.

Python API

import bpy

# Create bone collections
armature = bpy.context.object.data
bcoll_root = armature.collections.new("A Root Collection")
bcoll_child = armature.collections.new("Child Collection", parent=bcoll_root)

# Moving the bone collection after it has been created.
bcoll = armature.collections.new("collection")
bcoll.parent = bcoll_root  # Assign a new parent collection.
bcoll.child_number = 0     # Move to be the first of its siblings.

# Assigned bones can be retrieved hierarchically:
bcoll_child.assign(armature.bones['thigh.L'])
for bone in bcoll_root.bones_recursive:
    print(bone.name)


NLA

  • Add new channel options to Action bake (dd5b870d15).
  • Add bake custom properties to Action bake (4ddb52a775).
  • Rename "NLA Channels" to "NLA Tracks" (661e7e451a).
Action bake options.png
Action bake custom properties.png

Weight Paint

Bone Selection

The bone selection mode is made explicit when you enter weight paint mode with an armature. It now has an icon and can be accessed with the hotkey 3. The following selection tools have been added to make bone selection easier:

  • Tweak

Commits: edcac1f48b

Keying

  • Pressing I in the viewport will no longer pop up a menu of keying sets. Instead it will read the User Preferences which has a new setting to define which channels get keyed. (a99e419b6e)

Drivers

  • Single Property and Context Property driver variables now support a fallback value to use if the RNA path lookup fails. (d0ef66ddff, Manual)
  • Drivers that failed to evaluate are now underlined in red in the channel list of the Driver Editor. Previously that only happened for drivers attached to non-existing properties. (b9074381e5)

Graph Editor

  • Scale from Neighbor operator (b27718a9e7, Manual)
  • Add option to right click menu on animated properties to view the FCurve that animates it. (a91a8f3fed, Manual)
Demo of viewing the F-Curve of the animated property

F-Curve Baking

A new operator "Bake Channels" has been added to the Graph Editor. (1e931f5bd7, Manual)

It allows you to:

  • Specify a range to bake.
  • Define the distance between baked keys, e.g. 2s or 3s.
  • Remove keys outside the baked range.
  • Define a interpolation type for new keyframes.
  • Bake modifiers to keyframes.

It is found in the Graph Editor under Channel » Bake Channels.

Dope Sheet

  • Speed up Dope Sheet by only calculating keyframes that are visible in the current view. (f06fd85d97)
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