We've heard feedback from studios that they'd like the ability to have Sub-Tasks, allowing larger Tasks to be broken down into smaller components that can be assigned to users and mapped on the Gantt.
If you're keen to see this developed in Shotgun, please add your support to this request by clicking 'Me too'.
Definitely we need this in order to keep top level tasks clean and easy to read and small custom tasks under the master task. Right now we're using notes with a 'Due date' field to emulate this, and keep number of the top level tasks as less as possible so the managers could do their daily work effectively.
Also, It would be good if subtasks could affect parent task duration (start date & due date) with their duration (dates) by default, locked inside the paren't tasks time boundaries or push them out (if the manager want so).
Definitely, I would like the whole layout to be completely flexible and allow use of the Gantt charts will Tickets too. The page layout still feels very difficult not very user friendly or flexible.
Can we have more connections between all matching entity fields too (Like mentioned above) ? If I want a manager to set a task date beginning and ending, I don't know why I can't have this linked or driving sub-tasks or have that drive the linked item, it would be nice to have this either controlled by the manager or flexible depending on the setting.
As a related note our production team are keen for something similar but with sub-notes.
Something simple along the lines of a todo-list of check boxes (like wot git hub does https://github.com/ImageEngine/gaffer/issues/30 ) might be a winner here.
I like what Git uses with the checkboxes! It would be nice to see that in Tickets as well.
Sub-Tasks are created and managed by the Leads of a department.
Tasks are created and managed by the producers/coordinators.
It's very important to use Sub-Task in order to keep top level tasks clean, Lead manages the team better, Producers have a better understanding why some tasks take longer then expected.
I was wandering which is the status of this Feature Request.
We're trying to come up with a way to manage larger Director/SV type tasks within Shotgun as well -- for example, storyboards due by such and such date; director needs to analyze and decide which shots will have FX by XX date; SV needs to write up shot notes for layout artists by XX date.
Originally I had thought to use tickets for this kind of prep work, since you can set Due dates etc but the downside of that is that there's no way to display a Gantt for ticket-based tasks. Typically this isn't a huge deal, but with a TV series where each Dir/SV is handling multiple episodes at various stages, the Gantt is really useful to see how much overlap their is with the various prep/data analysis tasks, to make sure that the Dir is not too overloaded at any given time.
Sub tasks or nested task would be very useful for not only through the website for organization of projects, but also for guiding the artists working on certain tasks at a toolkit level.
From a toolkit point of view, my ideal solution would be to have an info panel showing the subtasks for the task context I am in, and have them able to have custom code checks assigned to them if I wish.
For example, on a UV mapping task, The artist will be presented with a dynamic list of sub tasks dependent of the content of the asset they are working on. Maybe they have opened an asset that has been pre tagged from an earlier task with objects need box mapping, but also some require a more time consuming unwrap.
Ideally I would have a sub task that says perform box mapping on all these objects, and another sub task that says manually unwrap all these objects.
Then at publish time, I could use the same sub tasks and my associated logic to perform a check to see that the artist didn't miss anything.
I would assume that the checks would be implemented by the studio through the use of hooks, but perhaps rather than throwing back an error message explaining why you can't publish we can display the sub task list again and show which has been ticked off and which is still to do.
That may sound too specifically suited to our studio needs to be appropriate for the wider shotgun community, I thought I would add my ramblings to the list.
Thanks
We're using notes with a 'todo' state, which is quite great - they can be created from anywhere and link to anything, and we have a page that views them as a todo list, and when the item is done, we simply change the note status to closed.
Might be cool to get 'official' subtasks, but the above workflow is already quite nice.
Hey everyone,
Just wanted to chime in to let you know I'm listening to all the comments and collecting use cases. In the past two weeks, I've visited a few studios and spotted some trends, similar to what you're all mentioning here:
- Some studios would be fine with just a list of items that can be checked off within a Task (similar to the Git model mentioned above). To pull this off, we think we'd need better formatting for the Task description (multi-line, ability to add checkbox formatting, etc). That's something we hope to do in a redesign of the Task detail page in the future.
- Some studios track the high-level work on a Shot using Tasks, and want one extra level the leads can use to further break down a Task. For example, Production might make a "Roto" Task, but the department lead wants to break that into "Rough Roto" and "Final Roto". Ideally, production and other departments look at the Roto Task to see the state of the work without having to see all the children Tasks. I have a question for the group on this one: Would providing better status summary view on Task Pipeline Steps be a solution here? In some ways, Tasks are children of Pipeline Steps, but Pipeline Steps aren't as flexible as a more general Task / Sub-Task model, like you're all suggesting.
- Finally, there's the Notes vs Tasks debate. Some people want to use Notes for the granular "todos", some want to use Tasks. It'd be great to hear more from the group about the pros / cons of using one over the other. If we have sub-tasks, should we let you create them from places where you create notes (like the Media Player?).
Keep your thoughts coming. I'm marking this Not Planned for now because it's not on the roadmap, but if we get more clarity on what to do here, I'll move it back to Planned.
I've tried managing tasks a few different ways over the past few years. Depending upon the leads, Task Templates have ranged from 4 tasks (combining chunks of work into gates akin to Pipeline Steps) to 93 tasks (using filter to hide tasks that have a Parent Task field which isn't null). I like the idea of viewing a limited number of tasks (4-5) as it makes the Gantt much easier to update which would drive larger units of tasks. So, I could have a "Model" task that is moved around in the Gantt, but the "Model" task is basically just a summary of it's 4 or 5 specific Sub Tasks. I could probably do this now by grouping the Pipeline Steps, but those don't always match the exact workflow or dependency order for a certain asset.
Currently, we use Notes as an informational exchange only to keep the nomeclature clean. We use Notes as communication that would end up written on a whiteboard or normally sent via email. For us, Notes never have tasks assigned to them. Tickets are used as Epics/Backlog items for larger chunks of work which may relate to either many or no Assets. For example, R&D work, shader creation, workflow discovery, testing, etc. Tickets are then broken down into Tasks which are needed to "finish" the ticket and assigned out. Tasks are considered to be exact known work which has time alloted via Bid and may be assigned to a specific Person or Group. Usually it is a lead who has broken down the Ticket into actionable Tasks.
Something like a 'parent task' field could be great too - just assign a parent task, then in the view page view a task tree. This would be very flexible.
Hello Ben,
It's great to see this topic is picked up again. We are in favour of the parent/child-task-solution which would allow a rough schedule on a project level, but offer departments to break this tasks further down where they see need for it.
We started an implementation based on pipeline steps, tasks and dependencies which were syncronised by Shotgun triggers, but it turned out to be too slow.
You are right, the pipeline steps are already providing some of the required features, but in our opinion they are missing one crucial feature. The ability to set a duration with start and end date which defines the time frame for all child tasks.
Cheers,
Christian
Adding sub tasks would be a Huge benefit. On our end I imagine it would be something very simple. Say, nested tasks under a parent task that can be checked off or maybe have their own variable status. So for example the animation task could have check boxes for the elements that need to go downsteam. When they are checked off the lighter or whomever know they can grab certain elements.
On that note, I don't see notes being a great way to do it. We currently use notes as a way to comment on a specific task. "SH010 animation - shot needs such and such done to it, please address and repost".
I wonder if there has been any development on this feature. We to would hugely appreciate the capability of adding sub-tasks. We currently create a task per pipeline step but in reality each pipeline step could have its own further sub-tasks which may not be relevant for producers to track but would be meaningful for the leads or artists. Currently we are mulling with the idea of using tickets for sub-tasks but if there's something already in development then we would like to hold off on designing our own hack.
Just adding to the choir of voices looking for sub-tasks. This is a pretty standard and essential feature included in every other scheduling tool I've used.
I would also love to see this feature! Currently we're having to make roughly 5-15 extra tasks that we'd rather be sub tasks (since they are) but that's the only work around we've found so far. Thanks!
Hi everybody,
Sub-tasks and/or todos are definitely very interesting topics for us right now and we'd love to hear more use cases from you for these features.
Add them to this feature request and if you are game for a conversation about them, let us know!
Echo-ing Rob, we're very interested in the use cases you guys have for tasks and sub tasks. If you're willing to share, I'd love to receive some examples of your current Task Templates and ways you work around the lack of sub-tasks. If you'd rather not post them publicly, please send them to ben.hadden@autodesk.com.
We often need to break up a single big task into smaller subtasks. For example there's a shot where a lot of stuff gets destroyed. There is a house getting destroyed that gets its own task, one artist is on it, but then there is a secondary element or several, like roof tiles getting thrown down, windows breaking, chimneys toppling. In water effects, there's multiple things to do too - an airplane crashing in the water requires water surface, splash, mist. These might be allocated to different artists and have different schedules, but within the timeframe of the root task.
For example - Parent task is "1st Edit". Sub-tasks would be Game Capture, GFX, Editing, Direction. This allows people assigned to the sub tasks to mark their part complete, while leaving the 1st Edit task open for other parties until all sub-tasks are marked complete. Without sub tasks, the GFX artist has the 1st Edit task on their queue persisting long past when they've already complete their graphical contributions to the 1st edit.
Similar to what has already been stated, we often want to use multiple sub-tasks for a single pipeline step. Currently we end up creating multiple tasks and link them all to the same pipeline step but it makes things a little unorganized and flat without any hierarchical relationship between a parent task and its sub-task for tracking. Also, it requires production to juggle around the start/end dates for the parent tasks only so that the gantts are not messed up. We have hacked around with custom fields like other using related tasks type linking and grouping them accordingly or tried to use tickets as sub-tasks but it just ends up causing more problems.
Ideally, we are looking for something like "workspaces" which can be more general than tasks and can still be tracked by the parent task of the workspace. Some pipelines treat such workspaces as "nodes" so a pipeline step task like modeling or effects can have multiple branch nodes that are owned by multiple users.
F.e. a complex fx task is broken down into:
These tasks may be distributed amongst multiple artists and their approvals may also be setup based on each task's individual review. While a workspace/node may not be in the direct purview of what shotgun tasks are meant for but it would be good to have some provision for such workflows. In some cases such sub-tasks can be further complicated by how bids are broken down and tracked with schedules and time-logging, milestones, versions for each sub-tasks, etc.. In such cases hierarchical tasks with the granular control of what can be set as a trackable item in the schedule while others are simply used for user workspaces or pipeline nodes would be super helpful.
It would be good to see/hear any broadstroke design by the shotgun team for allowing such workflows in the task context.
Our requirements mainly match the ones already listed. Often we need to break down the work of more complex shots into smaller chunks, e.g. destruction for different assets and all the secondaries.
Just recently we looked for solution to a problem where sub-tasks would have been very handy. For production tracking purposes we created an animation task per asset. Obviously animation can only start when the corresponding asset is ready. However the animation artist is not interested in this granularity. He just needs one task which indicates when he can start any work on this shot. Ultimately, the start date and end date could affect the start and end date of the parent task. In this case the parent would take the earliest or latest date respectively. However it would be helpful if this could be set on a case-by-case base.
Please let me know if you have further question on this topic. I'm happy to share more ideas as this a topic which keeps coming up for us and it is something which just cannot be implemented by using the Shotgun Event Framework.
Thank you!
An example of how we might use this:
We often break Model and Rig tasks into separate parts. For example, gray model work and texture work. It would be nice to be able to assign each of those to different artists, set separate start date/due date/ bids for each, etc.
