An Update on Blender's Animation 2025 Initiative

The Blender Foundation has published a new blog post, presenting an outline of the present status of the new animation data model's design and sharing a highly-anticipated update on its Animation 2025 project, initially introduced back in December 2022.

For those unaware, the Animation 2025 initiative is set to gradually improve and enhance Blender's rigging and animation tools over a three-year period, aiming to provide creators with a robust animation toolset by the end of 2025.

As part of the project, the developer plans to build prototypes of the new systems, prioritizing the Rig Explainer, 3D Onion Skinning, and Rigging/Constraint Nodes, overhaul Blender's Armatures, Actions, and Objects, allow multi-object animation, better data handling, layering of animation data, and more.

In the newly-shared blog post, the studio provided an update on the development of a 3D ghosting, a.k.a. onion skinning, system, which visualizes an animation in the viewport as a series of ghosts. Being developed in collaboration with the Grease Pencil team, the system has the following goals:

• To show data of different points in time, overlaid on the current view.
• A unified system that works for all object types.
• Editable ghosts, so that you do not necessarily have to move the scene frame in order to edit a ghost.
• Movable ghosts, to shift and trace, or the opposite, to space them apart to get a good overview of the motion.
• Non-blocking to the rest of Blender. Playback and scrubbing should not be slowed down by the ghosting system.

The post has also revealed a roadmap for the initiative, stating that Animation 2025's new functionality will be gradually introduced throughout the Blender 4.x release cycle, with the possibility that it may be initially available as an experimental feature in Blender 4.0, scheduled to release this November.

Furthermore, the team has disclosed that Blender 5.0, due in 2025, will include an automatic conversion process to migrate old-style animation data to the new system. Consequently, the old animation system will be completely removed from the UI in Blender 5.0.

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