Blender 4.2 LTS: Animation & Rigging¶
Motion Paths¶
- Motion Path points now use the Vertex theme color (fc025abde6).
- You can now specify a custom color for anything before or after the current frame. Previously this was a single color (883af6dd63).
Animation Editors¶
- New operator in the View (regular + pie) menu: "Frame Scene Range" (95966813ae). This changes the horizontal view to match the scene range. If the preview range is active, the operator will be re-labeled as "Frame Preview Range" and zoom to that instead. This was added to the Dope Sheet, Timeline, Graph Editor, NLA Editor, and Video Sequence Editor.
Graph Editor¶
- Modified the way the Ease operator works. It now creates an S-Curve shape that can be moved to
favor either the left or the right end. In addition to that, a "Sharpness" property was added to
control how abrupt the change is. Pressing
Tabwhile running the operator toggles which property the slider affects. (62f140e048, Manual). - The drawing code has been optimized resulting in smoother panning in heavy scenes. (3eda9619f9, 0157fede80)
- Performance when moving keys in heavy scenes has been drastically improved. Previous Blender versions could hang for minutes while it is instantaneous in 4.2. The more keys the scene has the more pronounced the effect is.(8a79212031, 6a55a126e9, c6c7d3d8c4, 08de3fa0b6)
Dope Sheet¶
- New key type: 'Generated' (51e1f29a68). This new key type indicates that the key was set by some automated tool (like an add-on), rather than manually by an animator. It is drawn smaller & dimmed in the Dope Sheet. These keys can still be operated on like any other, including changing their key type to something else.
- It is now possible to see and edit non relative shape key animations in the "Shape Key Editor". (7ff8a7b173)
NLA¶
- Performance of the editor has been improved when only viewing a section of a long action (24b4461be3).
- Update NLA "Make Singe User" operator modal text. (298c9276e9)
Armatures¶
- Subdividing a bone names the new bones in sequential order (9f0cc7fe64). Subdividing "Bone" makes "Bone.001" its first child, "Bone.002" the next, etc. Previously this would have been "Bone", "Bone.003", "Bone.002", "Bone.001".
- It is now possible to specify a wire width for custom bone shapes. This setting is per bone and can be found under the "Custom Shape" options of the bone (f9ea64b0ba). There is a known visual issue on vertex corners where the edges detach instead of forming a round corner. Work to mitigate this has been underway but it was decided to wait until the overlay engine had an overhaul.
- Bones can now be active even if they are invisible. That means you can select a bone from the outliner and edit its properties without having to unhide it. This was done in reaction to a bug report. (1ab66a6b4f)
- The Armature drawing mode "Stick" now uses bone colors (ef8f14f3d6).
Constraints¶
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The behavior of the "Limit Rotation" constraint has been modified to fix a bug (Bug Report, ed2408400d). In older versions the constrained object would flip back to the minimum when an angle is higher than 180º. This is now changed so values higher than 180º are supported. This means a minimum of 90º and a maximum of 270º now works properly. Also instead of snapping back to the minimum, the rotation will snap to the closest boundary when the rotation is out of the allowed range.
Since older files may rely on the previous broken behavior, a "Legacy Behavior" option has also been added to the constraint. "Limit Rotation" constraints from old blend files will automatically have that option enabled to preserve behavior, but users are encouraged to update their rigs to work with the new fixed behavior.
Drivers¶
- A new "Copy Driver to Selected" menu item is now available in the right-click menu of driven properties (bd3518946e). It copies the property's driver to the same property on all selected items (as long as they also have that property). It's essentially the same as the "Copy to Selected" feature, but copies drivers instead of values.
Copy Global Transform add-on¶
Copy Global Transform (manual) has gotten two new, related features (0b1d563a2f):
Fix to Camera¶
Also known as "bake to camera", this operator will ensure selected objects/bones remain static (relative to the camera) on unkeyed frames.
This is done by generating new keys. These keys will be of type 'Generated' so that it remains clear which keys were manually created, and which were generated. This way the tool can be re-run to re-generate the keys.
It operates on the scene frame range, or on the preview range if that is active.
Relative Copy-Paste¶
The "Relative" panel has copy/paste buttons that work relative to some object. That object can also be chosen in the panel. If no object is chosen, the copy/paste will happen relative to the active scene camera.
Pose Library¶
Added an option to "Blend Pose Flipped" from the context menu. Previously this was only available during modal operations. (3a40d2813f)
Pressing Ctrl before dragging on a Pose Library item now starts it in flipped mode. Previously this was only possible once the blending operation has started. (345cd70404)