Workfiles 'Pick a Work Area' dialog display ambiguities

Ben Toogood

July 28, 2015 16:26

None

Hi - we're starting to delve into the usability side of the default toolkit setup and I've got a question or two about the 'Pick a Work Area' dialog.

I'm a little concerned about the how quickly I felt lost when trying to use it, and I'm not sure if I'm approaching things from the wrong angle or whether I'm right in thinking it needs some tweaks.

To explain, consider the case where:

In the SG-Desktop app I select a project and then launch maya.
In maya I'm prompted to 'Click to Select a Work Area'
In the Pick a Work Area dialog I want to work on a task called 'master' for pipeline-step 'comp' on shot '001' of sequence 'MyTestSequence'

In the attached screen grab, in the left hand column you can see that there are multiple listing of 'Shot 001'. As far as I can see there isn't a way to tell which shot is which, without including the sequence name in the shot name, or adding the sequence name to the shot description. This would seem to require a bit of discipline which we're not so strong at here....

Then when I want to pick the task, as they all have the same name I again can't tell which one's which. We tend to use 'master' as our default name for things (I guess it's similar to how some places use 'hero' - in our parlance a shot could just have a master anim scene, or it might be split into foreground and background anim scenes etc).

So here I have a master-comp task, a master-anim task, and a master-light task. Alongside not being able to see the pipeline-step info, I feel like I instinctively want to filter the result here so that I only see tasks we consider relevant for maya (in this case filtering out the master-comp task).

Are those problems of my own making? Or are these things that have come up before?

Some of these problems seem better address in the 'new loader' approach to browsing - would using that interface for task selection be something you'd consider?

cheers

Ben

pickWorkArea.png

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5 comments

0
Alan Dann July 28, 2015 18:59
Hi Ben,

You are most definitely not the first person to come across these problems!

The good news is that we are currently working on a more loader/tree style browsing UI for the file manager which is hopefully only a few weeks away from being available.

In the mean time, there are some configuration settings for the current UI which I think will be of use to you.

Firstly, you can specify a dictionary of additional fields to display with each entity on the left-hand list through the sg_entity_type_extra_display_fields setting. For example, the following would display the Sequence for any Shot entities:
```
sg_entity_type_extra_display_fields: {Shot:{Sequence: sg_sequence.Sequence.code}}
```
Next, using the task_extra_display_fields setting, you can specify a list of additional fields to show for each task in the right-hand list. Each entry in the list should be the name of a valid field on the Task entity in Shotgun. For example, the following would display the Step name with each Task:
```
task_extra_display_fields: [step.Step.code]
```
As far as filtering out tasks depending on the application, you _could_ probably do this by filtering on a field through the sg_task_filters setting. For example, you could filter the tasks for those that are for a specific set of pipeline steps:
```
sg_task_filters: [["step.Step.code", "in", ["Light", "Model"]]]
```
You would then define these filters differently for each engine in the configuration.

These settings are described at the bottom of the page here and an example of where they live in the configuration for Maya in the shot_step environment can be found here (this is in the default configuration you probably used as a starting point for your project).

Does that help?

Thanks

Alan
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Ben Toogood July 28, 2015 18:59

Thanks Alan - that's great. We'll make those tweaks, and wait in eager anticipation for the new treeview :)

cheers

Ben

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Kevin Riach July 28, 2015 19:00

Where exactly do you insert the "sg_task_filters: [["step.Step.code", "in", ["Light", "Model"]]"? I've tried adding it to the asset_step.yml with the other fields, but its not reading it. Am I doing something wrong?

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Alan Dann July 28, 2015 19:00

Hi Kevin,

The sg_task_filters setting was added in version v0.6.1 of the tk-multi-workfiles app so make sure you are up-to-date by running the tank updates command. Run:

./tank updates

in your configuration root directory to update everything or if you want to be more specific, run something like this:

./tank updates shot_step tk-maya tk-multi-workfiles

Which will update only the tk-multi-workfiles app in the tk-maya engine for the shot_step environment. See the command output for more help with running the updates command.

Once you have updated to at least v0.6.1 then add the sg_task_filters setting into your config, for example:

engines:
  ...
  tk-maya:
    apps:
      ...
      tk-multi-workfiles:
        allow_task_creation: true
        file_extensions: []
        hook_copy_file: default
        hook_filter_publishes: default
        hook_filter_work_files: default
        hook_scene_operation: default
        launch_at_startup: true
        launch_change_work_area_at_startup: false
        location: {name: tk-multi-workfiles, type: app_store, version: v0.6.1}
        saveas_default_name: scene
        saveas_prefer_version_up: false
        sg_entity_type_extra_display_fields: {}
        sg_entity_type_filters: {}
        sg_entity_types: [Shot, Asset]
        sg_task_filters: [["step.Step.code", "in", ["Light", "Model"]]]   # <------------------------
        task_extra_display_fields: []
        template_publish: maya_shot_publish
        template_publish_area: shot_publish_area_maya
        template_work: maya_shot_work
        template_work_area: shot_work_area_maya
      ...

Hope that helps?

Thanks

Alan

0

Kevin Riach July 28, 2015 19:00

Alan,

That worked perfectly!

Follow up question: how would I go about filtering out entities by task status? The UI looks a little cluttered with all of these entities that have tasks being filtered out by the "sg_task_filters".

Thanks,

Kevin

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