 let's start yeah hello everybody so many people is great so welcome to our talk the future of character animation and rigging in blender that's it so as an introduction this is brought to you by the animation and ring module so it's just not this us three doing the presentation but it's really like a group project so please stand up everybody in the module or raise your hand or something so you guys may have heard of this little idea of animation 2020 and then stuff happened and you all know about it but a while ago ton and I had a talk and he was like you know what what why don't you start a new project three years three years to to give us a new animation system let's do that so we gathered a whole lot of information in the past weeks and it's like open for everybody documents we put calls out and on Twitter and stuff and it was amazing because people put in so much information in there and so many great ideas and nobody butchered the documents like the community is awesome yeah it's crazy the presentation is a little bit rough because we had a workshop last Monday through Wednesday and like really had to last minute all the slides in the presentation and because we had to put things in the presentation all of a sudden these ideas had to become concrete and drawn out and like as in mocked up so it was it was a bit hectic but I think we managed something quite nice so here we go with 37 pages of broad ideas 58 pages of all kinds of specific issues that we went through and reorganized then we started brainstorming and we had a shared whiteboard online and at like at like this kind of font size it was four and a half of five meters of stuff and we think we managed to like discuss that over the past weeks and during the workshop and set up a pretty good basis for future directions and that is pretty much what this presentation is about the goal is to keep like to empower animators to keep animating for the next decade and yeah this is big this is really big huge great ideas and this is like a bit of a disclaimer we have all kinds of ideas it's not a promise that you will get this in Blender 3.4 or 3.5 4.3 I don't know so before we start with like what they we do we had started by defining the core principles of a new animation system I feel that this was really an important part of our work so the principles are fast intuitive focused iterative direct and Suzanne and we'll go over each of those and and describe and show what how they impact the decisions and ideas and then we we had a beautiful design by Guillermo it was made on the last day of the workshop so fast is all about performance of Blender itself it's about basically well the idea is that that when blender is super fast you get to try different things because if you don't have to wait for the software you can make different decisions you can try out various things in instead of having to wait all the time which internally she to create a freedom and that's the final goal so performance of Blender roughly we're looking at two different speeds you have the interaction speed when you're pulling on limbs and bones and posing your rig that has to feel real-time from usability studies apparently that's about 12 frames per second so it's a nice goal it's not in the numbers because it's a scary thing to promise but still as a mental model we'll look at that so there shouldn't be any chugging it shouldn't require a dumbed-down rig when you're interacting with it or have like cut up solid meshes where you can't really see all the intersections it should be on the final default mesh and then there's playback speed so when you're doing a play blast that should be real-time that should be at your project frame rates that you can really see what you're doing and to give an example of a challenge in there currently Blender takes a default mesh and that every deformation recomputes all the normals and then sends the whole thing into the GPU module which then converts it to another representation which sends that to the GPU which does other stuff with it on every single change so it's a challenge to see how not to do that another idea that we have is some asynchronous evaluation so that the character or characters you're working on they respond in real time but maybe the background crowd is not that interesting so they could be updated at a lower frame rate and of course you have to have control over this because maybe how a foreground to the background character overlap is important to you and then you should have control so one of the ideas that we have oh sorry the rigor things that so we talked about Blender being fast but you can always make a rig that is super super slow no matter how fast Blender is and so it is sort of a dance between Blender developers and rigors to make sure that we come together and make something fast so this is an idea just a markup of what could be the rig explainer what is connected to this particular bone I have selected well it's the bone and it has some constraints that reference other objects and it had connected to other bones and maybe you want to see the opposite this particular prop which constraints refer to that prop and there could be five rigs that all point to that particular prop this is something that is very difficult to figure out now in Blender without clicking on every single bone and checking every single constraint also we could do things maybe he like performance heat maps that maybe like the facial rig is getting slow and so that shows up in red maybe some muscle deformation in the in the shoulders shoulders are getting slow maybe some other deformations are sluggish and they turn up yellow but to give just a view like this on your rig itself I think it will be fantastic and then also just as an idea like once we get Blender that fast we can it open stores we can do other stuff like having some onion skinning where the current frame is shown there the net future frame some food frame is shown there and it's still editable maybe Jason you want to talk about that intuitive sure hi everyone yeah so obviously a big part of what we're trying to do is make rigging more intuitive at the moment when you go to start using a rig if you know about Rigify you have to go and like enable it and then you've got to create your you have to bring in the rig and then you got to build it and then you got to go select things and so there's a lot of like inherent knowledge you have to have in order to build things up you also if you don't use Rigify you have to know to create an armature so we talked a lot about intuitiveness for rigging we talked a lot about intuitiveness for animation and like it says here Blender has very specific workflows if you're coming from other software it can be a little bit daunting to come in and be like I don't know so what we're really looking for with intuitive is something that is familiar and self consistent which is the big thing coming from other software you're going to have different ideas but what should happen is as you use Blender it should be intuitive to sort of figure out and lead you along a path to figure out what to do but then it should be really really consistent I think the G key is an example for all across Blender once you learn G means move you use it everywhere super super intuitive and because it's consistent so we want that same experience throughout all of rigging and animation yeah starting rigging like I said and then a big part of this as well is rigging notes with a component library and fuzzy search so imagine you are going to go break a character and you want to start like building on your egg imagine you've got this great component library of like a leg and an arm and a finger and a head and you just sort of go I'm now rigging and I'm done and your producer is like oh my god you're amazing here's all the money we would have spent over the last three months on you right now sweet and the idea with fuzzy search is like you know we all have different languages and how we talk about rigging so for example some people let's say I want to rig something where a character is looking at an object some people would call that a look at constraint others would call it a name constraint others would call it a point of that thing you constraint whatever it'd be nice if we had a fuzzy search for notes or components where you could just say you know I'm going to type it in my language and go I know what you said here's what you mean and you go thanks Blender awesome so we want that sort of intuitive sort of experience and like Stephen was saying a rig explainer that explains to you how the rig is working so at the moment like he said in order to figure out what's going on you have to sort of click around and know where to find things and you've got you know mechanical bones and you've got to form bones and you've got control bones and if you don't know about those then it's like super confusing so having a way to explain the rig and how it's evaluating and what you've built is super helpful but also as a way of documenting for animators because you're going to bring on maybe 50 people to work with your rig and to be great if they'd all didn't call you and say how did the hands work and how does the face work imagine a way to be able to document the rig as you're creating it so new people coming on either to support the rig and adjust it or to use it have the documentation right there so rig explaining for both directions would be really cool here's an example with some rig components mocked up by Sarah who is over there high-fives back there so there's a couple of really cool things here in the bottom it's a node-based rigging system we're gonna be talking about nodes a lot because I don't know of anyone who doesn't want to rig with nodes if you do there's a door over there so you've got node-based rigging so it makes sense to see the flow as you're building the rig and using it we've got the presets over on the right and then what's really cool is I love the idea of actually instead of trying to drag it in like drag a component into the node system and hook it up drag it onto the rig itself that's where the hand is drag it there and it goes oh this is the right arm or this is the left arm cool I'm gonna make a right arm rig and then it hooks it in for you automatically so that kind of stuff is very cool do you want to talk about temporal controls yes I handed over thank you very much yeah so temporary control it would be great if you could add certain constraints and modify the rig just temporarily because maybe those constraints are just for that particular pose or that particular shot and you don't want to have to go back to the riggers and ask them to put a constraint in and then have that constraint in there for the rest of the production so this is also a nice mock-up by Nate and Nathan there is Nate so let's say you have a tally ball and you want to animate that and then you can select a bone you can pin it and now it's just pinned in world space and then you can select another bone you drag it up and that pin bone just stays there I think this is very much possible with just some IK stuff we want to have this kind of of intuitiveness in the controls another thing to look at is selecting two bones and there you have a bit of tail controller that you can just grab drag and slap on yeah and then you can actually grab a controller and drag it down and it does its thing and once you're done with it just you can discard that part of the control rig and part of this and I don't think that's oh and I managed to mess up the underside so this is not direct this is in the intuitive part of this idea is that we might want to separate posing from interpolation these kind of rigs great for posing and maybe it for a different shot or a different movement you want to pin other joints together and move them as a whole or do reparenting or whatnot but once that pose is there it doesn't really matter how well it was what's made and then you have controls for interpolation maybe you want to say to a bone now you're interpolated positionally and then of course that implies that that chain is IK instead of FK but it would be a property of a bone whether it's rotationally or positionally interpolated and of course some constraints like angle constraints and that kind of thing maybe they are permanent on the rig maybe there are only temporarily for that particular pose next of the fibits is focused and this is all about activating flow state you want to work you want to keep working you don't want to hunt around for that particular constraint panel oh no it was not on the object but on the bone that kind of thing another great example where Sarah and also her idea by the way is to have constraints live in the 3d space so instead of having to select the bone and then go to another panel and then scroll around maybe that constraints lives within the two things it constraints together and you can just point at it in 3d space and then work with it or maybe we have also a constrained library that you can just drag a constraint slap it on somewhere another example of focus is driving shape keys and on the left you see the whole laundry list of how to do now the current way and that includes like grabbing the wrong axis trying things again accidentally leaving post mode having to select geometry again getting coffee coming back whereas what we want is as simple as how you would explain it to a person if the arm is like this the bulge is like that if the arm is like this the bulge is like that done also means no distractions so when you're working blend and this is basic already a general blender principle while you're working blender shouldn't change the UI from underneath you and put you in all different configuration where you don't know how you got there or how to get back things shouldn't be super flashy or popping in and out of existence all the time the next one is iterative basically celebrating exploration making it possible to to try out different things I think Brett wants to say something about that so I think you know the thing that I like about blender is that it doesn't punish you for trying things usually right it's forgiving of exploration and rigging and animation is typically not so exploring you see people do incredible explorations and geometry nodes and the results are all over this conference they're amazing so I think the the ability to change your mind without destroying all your work is important for rigging and animation the model updates someone does a new storyboard you don't want to have to go back and rebuild everything to this point because someone had a new idea and that happens for everyone in production someone sketches 15 second idea and it's four months of work out the window and you start over so yeah everybody can change their mind and you're not punished for it you get to go yes I'm gonna just slap on a new rig and explore this idea yes and iterate part of this is right now for layered animation you don't have a global layer all of the controls all the actions live under each object so wouldn't it be nice if I'm trying to animate two characters passing a ball back and forth if I could interact with that animation at a global scene level and then organize that in a way that makes sense because if I animate them in the scene by themselves handing a ball back and forth each rig and armature are separate and act when I want to blend them together or maybe I move them to a playing basketball on a ship at sea that animation now I have to manage all of these places so having the ability to have a global animation layers system to be recording keyframes and managing that data is part of the redesign of where actions live and it's an important step to making animation faster and less punishing it also goes into all kinds of other things you can do once you have them not tied to an object sharing scenes having complex edits that are shared between files and retargeting and all the stuff that comes with it and at that I will pass it to Jason for some yeah so this is something that happens quite a lot in production where you're you know you start working on your rig everyone starts animating you're doing your tests and then some animator I won't point it myself because I never do this but somebody always says hey wouldn't it be better if we had a rig that does this and then it's the character TV you're like that is a such a good idea all right there's 13 other animators who are animating already and then we've got to show these tests to the director and then we're gonna have to make this change and how do I push it through and tell people not to update or update and it becomes a big ordeal to manage it so this is a quick mock-up of like a leg selector that you could do in rigging notes this is actually possible now if you use the rigging nodes add-on where you could go ahead and create two different types of leg rigs and then make a little switch so that you can have animators using the old leg rig or the new leg rig and so we want to make the ability to update rigs without destroying your entire pipeline something that is built in and very very possible and easy to do and I directly give it to you unless I step right back up again yeah you may want to oh yeah that's your thing hey thanks for the introduction that was amazing hey how's everyone been doing great so direct so yes in this this fits a lot with like basically just trying to it works a lot with focused you may notice a lot of these principles that we have are sort of a Venn diagram of importance because they are really all about helping you as we said before empowering you to spend all of your time animating or as much as possible so mess mesh based control selection so the idea here is that you don't have to generate these sort of curve controls that kind of represent the thing that you're trying to select we want you to be working directly on the objects as you're animating them so if I'm you know working on the face I should be able to corner the mouth and move it because that's the thing I want it shouldn't be like well which of these curves is the thing that represents what I want it's like just pick it and drag it so the idea is here as I am moving the mouse over to the hips which is I want to grab it's showing like pre-selection highlighting so that by the time I go and I pick it I know that that was the thing that I wanted to pick so it's like some sort of predictive like hey I'm getting over there you're gonna pick this thing so I know when I get what I want and I'm not like oh I picked the wrong thing oh I picked the all the way through there like show me what I'm gonna pick and let me pick it directly on the mesh so that I can just keep working straight from there as well as that once you have something selected there are all sorts of other things that may be related to the thing that you have selected that you might want to pick for example if and this is another mock-up by Sarah so good job we're also proud of our mock-ups like we did images this is great so yeah so imagine you like pick the tip of the finger you should be able to grow your selection just like you can with geometry to pick the rest of the finger controls so go all the way up the finger or across the entire hand or very quickly be able to say yeah pick all of the fingers or pick the fingers on the other hand or pick all of the IK controls on the arm or maybe the FK and the IK controls or maybe there's some new K kind of control that someone's gonna come up with like a medicaid anyway so being able to have the ability to quickly select the related controls to work with them the way that you want is another thing that we want to do so we've already seen the temporary editing and temporal editing is another thing play like part of the direct idea is that all the visualizations that we present in blender basically they should be editable that's at least our idea so that if you see a motion path motion trail you should just be able to edit it and that includes the handles so you should be able to just drag them up and go to the center one and maybe I don't know scroll wheel or some control to drag the keyframes in words to retime your animation and and also we've already seen a bit of this so you should be able to have the key that the current frame in the middle previous frame next frame select one bone select the other bone drag them both up over time then we have posing in VR and already yesterday morning that was it no this morning I think we're shown anyway why not have a composed character pointed it in VR and body and then you can hold your hand in a certain pose and character has that pose I think this is all current technology that should just work and then finally we have the Suzanne principle and basically this means be a good blender citizen we're not reinventing all of blender and it has to fit within the the blender mindset the blender philosophy it has to have a consistent UI and UX throughout all of blender so we're not going to change things just for the animation module like maybe maybe there will be bigger changes that go across blender but then they really have to be done in collaboration with other modules also blenders backward compatibility promise I think is really strong you can still open a blender 1.0 file and everything that can get converted will be converted and like of course it's not perfect but there's a lot of effort in the versioning code and making sure that you can still load older stuff so before we would kick out the current system we would definitely make sure that if we kick it out that would happen only after we made a compatibility layer same as the proxy system was only removed after there was automatic conversion to library overrides also the blender community process is super important and that will just stay there I mean animation and rigging module is busier than ever and I think it's it's super important to keep that going and then finally what does it mean so often people point at other software or other things in life and say oh I should do it like that because that is so awesome yeah but why what's what's the idea behind that thing that you like so much why does it bring you so much pleasure to use it what what is it and then how does that translate to blender and because if we're just going to copy ideas from other systems it's going to be a mess it's going to be boring it's going to be only what other people do and then we're always running behind and we want to shape the future so we've seen fast intuitive focused iterative direct and Suzanne aka fifths because one fifth it is never enough so before people ask questions we wanted to present a list of givens like these are things we're thinking about we want to have of course we know it's of course animation layers of course we want to have easier multi-objects animation we want to improve the core animation data handling we want to have rig explainer the profiler animating in VR super fast rig evaluation so everything is running at super speed we're not mastering of time we should be able to polish time we should be able to sculpts animation data even when it's like a huge bucket of mocap data you should be able to work with that easily simpler things like bone pickers so the next steps the the current development will just continue so we're not abandoning all of blender to make something new and shiny and come back in 10 years some things we can maybe start already while we're like bug fixing the current system and tweaking and polishing things maybe like a profiler we could maybe already make regardless of the evaluation engine for rigs and then just plug it into the new system when we have that maybe also things like caching of of meshes over time maybe we can also do that already in that never without having a completely new system so I will organize things I will categorize all the ideas that will go over all the information that we have again and try to figure out how do we do things and how much work it is and also what should come first like what are the biggest questions that we have that block us from implementing all these ideas and then try to build a coherent vision with the entire module so the timeline this year next year explore possibilities makes prototypes try things out especially because we want to basically start with the biggest unknown we have to try it out things and see how they work and what doesn't work and then usable cool stuff no promises as to what that will be but I wanted to be usable I want to be cool so I wanted to be stuff yeah lots of stuff definitely looking for developers so if you have interest in working on this come to me let me know also we have the animation module channel on blender chat we have on deaf talk to blender.org we always publish the meeting notes they also have links to the previous meeting notes and if you're an older one to the next meeting notes there is also the link to the Google Meet Room that we use for the weekly module meetings because as of now they're going to be every week instead of every other week we have a calendar I set that up where all the meetings are in so you have one URL that you can slap onto Google Calendar or something and then you'll get notifications about all the meetings that we're planning thank you very much well we finally be going away from weight painting in the future well at least the households yes of course AI for everything the answer is AI yeah I think we talked about one of the things is freedom from like to change things and not freak out and that's one of the big problem there's a couple problems with weight painting having to redo your work sorry having to redo your work after you know your models change and everything is well joyful probably not something you want you to have to deal with anymore as much as possible so there's that's that's something we're going to look at obviously we're looking at ways for getting weights transferred faster there are already some good tools for it but we want to make that easier and then yeah AI maybe there's some more intelligent ways to do weight painting maybe some machine learning around skinning some companies are doing that which is really impressive so definitely something we're looking at to make better strong agenda too and like basically bringing in all the bits and pieces that are hidden everywhere and consistent work flow so that you can access the pieces easily as opposed to being like oh that's over here and that's over here so it's all your tool sets right there weight painting and leather right now it's actually pretty amazing but it's all over the place more questions I'm not going from character animation but I just guessed because you're like animated two things in time so would like mastering time also incorporate like seeing the speed of animation somewhere to see like speed of something and also yeah so the question is which is we want to visualize speed basically I think yeah we should when we have these motion trails and right now they're white so there is plenty of space there to make them a different colors we could choose we can choose colors we can make them thicker or thinner or maybe you want to we actually talked about this during the workshop maybe you want to see acceleration there instead of velocity and I think that shouldn't be too hard to do we only have so much time for markets yeah absolutely if you use for example motion paths also to edit and these are basically curves so the quit I'm going to repeat the question for the microphone and the recording and the people at home so the question was since motion paths are basically points in space what would be able to edit them with geometry nodes I think it's an interesting idea for sure yeah yes what can you speak up louder oh yeah that should be in the gibbons yeah like collections for for like organizing your rig yeah for sure you want like names on those or something oh yes and we also have ideas on like really looking at organization of rigs so that includes just plain outlier that includes selection sets being defined on the rig and maybe extendable per shot those kind of things right I'll just follow up so right now that's still conceptually just everything stuck in the armature as an object and so we're right now you enter that to do a lot of the stuff and including actions for animation layers right everything is owned by the armature and lives in there and it's it's limiting to some degree there's a lot of great from things about it as well so there's a lot of discussions in the you know four acres of the discussion about how the current system is limiting and what it's good and how to improve those things so the the paper cuts like making that better before you know ten years from now yes but it shouldn't be we shouldn't even be stuck in the thought of like well I want to make this part of the armature better how do I make armatures better for all of blender right mechanical rigging human deformation realistic things face rig all that stuff so the answer yes if it's a if it's a current thing in there we want it better but don't get stuck thinking that that's the only way it could be which is what we also want to improve yeah somebody so one of their already like wrote down an idea of just getting rid of armatures altogether and at least to have consistent controls over objects and bones and to be able to to manipulate those in a similar way without having to flip between different modes all the time oh yeah to get rid of yes to get rid of the constraint bone constraints versus object constraints yeah probably I mean the question is improvements to rigify on cloud rig can we push them back to rigify where's tomato it's always in the studio actually few minutes ago discuss things about like future of rigify and I don't want to make it just like move that discussion to now but I think we should discuss moving rigify under the umbrella of the module because it's such a core concept and for this I feel the same like either we should improve it or we should replace it with something way better so that everybody forgets about it Nathan was actually involved in the original first version of rigify yes we have to look at like where the overlaps are between blenders general dependency graph and the regular explainer that we saw the evaluation of rigs versus the entire scene and probably is going to be one system one evaluation engine currently there is already an add-on that allows you to visualize the dependency graph but you need graph is installed because it uses it generates a file and then it needs to call that and then and then you can see it but it always will show the entire dependency graph of the entire scene and that gets very big very quickly so that's why we were thinking of the rig explainer where you can just click on one bone and see that context or a couple of bones and see that context and yes visualizing dependency cycles is definitely a thing that should be in there and I would love it if that again with a direct principle that when you wouldn't even have to go to the dependency like the rig explainer because it's shown on the rig like these bones and then that connection and that that is painful so more questions yes we've mostly discussed yes I mean short answer yes so what kind of improvements to the graph editor in the dope sheets are we envisioning that's basically the question so yes we would love to have improvements the thing that we've been looking at so far mostly was to avoid having to go into the graph editor in the dope sheet in the first place yeah I'll take this a little bit if you don't mind so right now animation is very dependent on feedback right and your feedback for what a control what a result is is the graph editor your your only view on timing is playing back and hoping as fast enough or looking at small dots and your other feedback for when something goes wrong or trying to control something is the graph editor none of those are related to what's actually on screen in your manipulation so a large part of this process the direct model is just like going to the re explainer should be or going to the rig nodes or going deep into something is for troubleshooting for fine-tuning you shouldn't from the gate try to have to figure out all of these rig controls as spaghetti curves so the more intuitive controls the more control you get in the viewport in context with the pose the feedback the ghosting you always know where you are in reference you watch glenkein animate you draw something he throws another drawing down he draws again he's not thinking like I wonder how I can convert this to a line over time and tweak a tangent handle and do an illustration project in bezier curves he's like no I'm just going to erase that and redo it so the the faster it is it means faster interaction and less relying on having to guess and do the conversion to curbs over time mastering time includes improving the entire manipulation of time and not having to because I've had arguments about people for backup is why I've had discussions with people about using animation layers as an example and the fear about animation layers is I don't have control over when I bake data or I bake animation I lose all of the organization that I've been carefully creating in the time editor or in the in the graph editor right I've got my keys organized I know that I can move things and everything is updatable because I've kept it organized to me that does not in my head equal creativity and exploration it means that you're afraid of change because you've got an organized system and you're you can only change it because you're controlling it and if someone else opens that file and wants to change something or comes back to their own file which we've all done and you're like I don't remember how I created this but now I have to change it and you can either throw it away and work starting over which is kind of the current method I've spent weeks fine tuning curves and building graphs and now I wonder the director changes this and you're like okay well I guess I will delete this and start over and the improving the graph editor is like improving the the readout of your car engine like you should just be able to get in the car and drive real fast and you shouldn't have to like first check the all the engine like readouts and make sure that the car is gonna start and right now the current graph editor time control keyframe system is well your your check oil light is on but really it means that like you're gonna crash you know it's like everything is in this little separate world from what you're trying to do and so direct fast is moving you away from this like separation of head and you know mind and body and just keep you in the viewport so yeah if you want graph editor go for it but it shouldn't be a requirement to have someone create yeah so we're not getting rid of it no it's an important diagnostic interpolation is useful for other things besides character animation and it's it's important to be able to be comfortable with change and that means not being afraid that you lose control because you suddenly have a hundred keyframes instead of two and that's currently I've watched people over and over again be afraid of change because it means that they have to start something over and again you watch any other artist and it's a destructive process like a sculptor is just like I I took too much clay away stick it on I don't care I'm just messing around with it they aren't like well if I lose the shape you watch someone sculpt you watch someone draw or paint you know like I made the analogy watercolor someone has to like you pre-dry the paper if you want to add more you mix it it's like this last thing but an oil painter can paint something and come back a week later and still mess with it right like it's the paint the medium allows change over a long period of time and the two systems both exist there's beautiful watercolor paintings are beautiful oil paintings so they're people making mechanical rigs and animation that absolutely need a graph editor interpolation and those tools should be better you should be able to filter apply data stuff just like geometry nodes to animation and you have that that little grain of concept in modifiers but wouldn't that be nice if it was expanded the same control you have over geometry we had that over animation and that's really where I would like to see it go well basically yes both for sure anyone anyone and because I think what we try to achieve is something that is much more on the conceptual level and to try out different things different ways of working different visualizations and then it doesn't really matter whether like it's in Python or C++ except for the fast there it but like would a control work better if you drag it like this or you drag it like that if that controls made in Python it's a bit sluggish for prototyping is fantastic and yeah and there is there's all kinds of other things that don't really matter whether it's in Python or C++ and even when it does matter if you have a prototype working and working well and everybody says I want this then converting it into C++ is much easier because you know what you're aiming for so the developer job is a paid it's not just volunteer yeah one at yeah no really there's a job opening for animation development shape keys to a cache yes that's something that Andy was also talking asking for I think already in spring or maybe earlier just the ability to load in cached cached matches and then sculpt on top of that because once you start lighting you see that then shadow just falls wrong and you want to move the hand a little bit that those kind of things yes no it's not under development no sorry oh no we have to I want to we have to really find how shape keys work because right now they internally in blender they're a bit of a mesh bit of a mesh haha there are pointers going everywhere it's hard to work with these in terms of library overrides they're very tied to the mesh but they're not like not every tool unless it has very specific code not every tool takes the shape keys into account so it's it's hard to work with them so I would love it if we could have a different way of working with shape keys maybe maybe even one that allows you to just use sculpting tools on the mesh and then it would save the effect of that sculpt so that you can load in a mesh of a different topology and still your your shape you would work like I don't know how to do it yet but I think that will be kind of nice key mesh add-on sounds good what's involved to execute? Last question, Howard. Is there anything different about your vision for motion graphics as compared to character animation? Is there anything different between character animation and motion graphics in our vision? Not really. I mean, we were looking at character animation just to make sure that we don't go off on everything because in the end, everything is animation, at least from our point of view, right? So but I think that these things equally apply to motion graphics, especially when we look at rigging notes about more procedural ways of working. This is also one of the reasons why we don't want to get rid of interpolation, for example. Because you could do character animation without interpolation, just animate every frame. But for motion graphics, more mechanical things, this is unmaintainable. So yeah. We just got a sign that we have to stop. Thank you.