Anim picker improvements

[Philippe]

Hi guys,

I’m working pretty intensively with the anim picker right now and as I have a lot of characters to do anim picker for, some tasks are really daunting and time-consuming if I want to get it perfect.
I took some notes on what might be awesome to have for further releases. Kinda like my Xmas list here

• Align tool (cf. illustrator)
• Points coordinates from world not local
• When you have an object selected and you click another object, the first one deselects itself
• Undo / Redo functions
• Fix with color alpha in settings menu
• Bug with scaling
• Group objects
• Being able to move text independently / align text with its object
• Import Illustrator vectors/shapes
• Not having the editor and the picker as two separate things but maybe having the picker and right clicking on a button and opening the settings menu.
• Being able to define the windows size for each picker/tab

I’m on Windows 10, Maya 2020.2
Thanks for you fantastic software guys!

[Rafael]

Hey @Philippe

I am happy to hear you are putting the anim_picker through its paces. Thank you for sharing your notes. I am going to post some questions and comments below, borrowing your bullet point style.

• Align tool (cf. illustrator)

** So an alignment type gride for pickers?

• Points coordinates from world not local

** Could you clarify this?

• When you have an object selected and you click another object, the first one deselects itself

** The pickers mimic Maya, do you still have this issue if you SHIFT + click another item?

• Undo / Redo functions

** We have limited undo/redo functionality. For movement only What additional features were you interested in?

• Bug with scaling

** I have seen people mention this, but I cannot recreate the issue in 2018 or 2020.3

• Group objects

** Oooh, this is a great idea.

• Being able to move text independently / align text with its object

** I like it

• Import Illustrator vectors/shapes

** I have never thought of that, what application do you use to create your vector shapes? Can you share one?

• Not having the editor and the picker as two separate things but maybe having the picker and right clicking on a button and opening the settings menu.

** This one is going to be difficult because we purposely like to “lockout” our animators from being able to edit things accidentally.

• Being able to define the windows size for each picker/tab

** I like the idea of this, as I understand it. So if you size a window certain way for X tab and switch to Y it will remember its size?

Thanks for sharing your notes. Let me know if any of these are really hindering your production because I want to know which ones are most important to people so when I hop around from issue to issue, I can prioritize.

[Philippe]

Hi @Rafael!
Thanks for your reply. It’s awesome to be able to discuss the future of MGear with you guys
Let’s stick to the bullet point format and I’ll tell you at the end what are the most crucial things for my production are as we have a lot of characters to set up an animPicker for:

• Align tool
  I was really thinking about the alignment tool we have in Illustrator
  

• Point Coordinates from world not local
  I was talking about the fact that when you go inside the XY handles coordinates, their values are determined based on the center of the object, not the center of the picker. So you can’t sometimes copy values from one button to the other as their XY values would give something totally different.

• When you have an object selected and you click another object, the first one deselects itself
  It doesn’t exactly behave like in Maya. I don’t know if it’s a bug on my computer but let’s break it down as it was probably one of the most annoying thing for me When you have something selected in maya and you select something else, you click one time to select this other thing and a second time to be able to move it. This second time is the moment where the first item got deselect.
  Here it’s trickier.
  You have one control selected, you click on another one and you are instantly able to move it around. There’s no second click, so there’s no deselection of the first item.
  It’s very annoying because you spend a good amount of time placing precisely a button and you select another one and end up moving everything.
  And because there’s no undo function, you have to redo the first button position.
  It happened to me a good 20 times on one picker as it’s almost a reflex with UI and software.
  The general rule is that the first click to select an object deselect everything else and if don’t want that, you press Maj while clicking.
  If it’s a bug only on my side, nevermind my note, I’ll show you a video

• Undo / Redo functions
  I was thinking a general Undo / redo function for the entirety of the picker, not something specific but if we had to choose, probably for the button positions.

• Bug with scaling
  I’m in 2020.2. It will probably get fixed in 2020.3 as I update Maya.

• Group objects
  Even a simple one, like in illustrator with Ctrl + G to group or Ctrl + Maj + G to ungroup

• Being able to move text independently / align text with its object*
  Maybe it’s me but I didn’t found if you could only create text without a button. That would be great.
  And yes, having the possibility to move the text + the object separately. But if we can create text alone and group objects that would do the same trick

• Import Illustrator vectors/shapes
  I’m totally super crazy about UI/ UX and always want to have the more control I can. The last picker I did, I did it first in Illustrator, which I use a LOT, to be able to really focus on the design and on the UI/UX. Then export it and import the picture inside the picker as a BG image. So I could place my buttons on top and use it as a guide. That’s how much anal I am about UI/UX
  So yeah, being able to import let’s say an .eps file or any kinda vector file would be awesome.
  Basically, the idea is that would “extract” all the design/shape/color work from the Picker editor to focus on implementing the function and scripts onto the buttons. Instead of recreating Illustrator features inside the Editor, you would be able to import the UI right away.

• Being able to define the windows size for each picker/tab
  To me, this is really a UX question. Being able to zoom inside the Picker is amazing. But because I’m creating a “product” for the animator to be used, I want it to be perfect right out of the box. So if the picker appear and the animator has to zoom in right away to be able to read a certain text of see a certain controller, that’s not good to me.
  Being able to define the windows size in pixels and match exactly the BG image we created would be awesome And yes, it’ll remember the size, like the Body tab has one size and the Face tab has another.

• Not having the editor and the picker as two separate things but maybe having the picker and right clicking on a button and opening the settings menu.
  I understand you do this on purpose. Maybe there is a way to make it easier and safe at the same time. Would you consider it to lock position and you would have to right click to a menu to unlock or to edit the settings? It would take two steps to protect from unwanted clicks.

I think the most important to me would be the Undo /redo functions, the object selection thing and the align tool.
Thank you so much Rafael for this, MGear rules!!
Philippe

[Rafael]

Hey @Philippe
What version of mgear do you have currently?
The latest version supports Undo/Redo while in edit mode. But it is only positional information(for now?), not picker creation or deletion.

Object selection: I am assuming you mean while in edit mode. I think I see what you mean, while in edit mode. You select an additional picker and are immediately able to move it. And if a previous picker was still selected it moves as well. Which is very annoying, an not like maya at all. I will definitely try to look into changing this behavior.

The align tool. Do you think you could show a video or gif or how you would imagine it working? I am unfamiliar with illustrator, sadly. And I just want to bring myself up to speed with your suggestion.

Point coordinates from world - That just sounds like a bug, I will look into this.

I know you had additional suggestions, which are definitely valid, I just wanted to clarify the ones you said were most important to your workflow.

Thank you!

[Philippe]

Thank you Rafael.

Actually the one priority would be the window size problem as it is what I’m struggling on my production.
Right now, when I open the picker I did, you need to increase the size of the window by hand and zoom in to have all the elements perfectly readable. It would be great to have that right off the bat when you open the picker, be able to : 1 - being able to define the picker size in pixels in the editor settings or 2 - save the window size when saving in the editor.

I’m using 3.6.6b as I’m working on the same production than Miquel but did not tested it yet with the editor.

• For the object selection, you got it it’s exactly that, thanks for trying to fix this

• I’ll make a video to show you how the align tool works in Illustrator.

• Thanks for the coordinates fix, it looked like a bug

Thanks again for this Rafael

[Philippe]

Here’s a video about the align tool. Sorry the tool palette is in french but here’s the english version:

Thanks Rafael

[Rafael]

@Philippe
Thank you for your video!
I totally get the alignment suggestion now. And it is a valid one.

I think speaking with/in images is the best way to convey a bug or feature. So with respect to the defining picker window size. I want to define what you have in mind.

So when you talk about “defining window size per picker”. Do you mean per PICKER or per TAB ?

Going with the picker route.

If I switch from PICKER_DATA to OTHER_DATA

Would it look like this?

When you have time, could you show me a before and after of what you mean?
Cheers!

[JimBo_Drew]

i added a toggle button to mine to hide the selector is this something anyone else is intrested in?

with regards to align tools, i been extracting all my buttons as maya curves and just using maya point and grid snapping thread
i’ve done a bit more work on this on my machine so i really should figure out how to use github and commit

[Miquel]

@JimBo_Drew

i’ve done a bit more work on this on my machine so i really should figure out how to use github and commit

@JimBo_Drew that will be awesome!

if you need help to create a pull request in github, please let us know

[Rafael]

@JimBo_Drew
Great idea for hiding the character selector. Here is my implementation of the idea.

Perhaps your implementation of the pickers-to-curves would satiate @Philippe need for alignment?
In any case, more to come!

[Philippe]

Thanks Rafael, sorry it took me so long to answer.
About “defining window size per picker”, tabs would be awesome but if we can already have it per picker, that would be huge too. If you switch to OTHER_DATA, you get this larger picker but could you define the size somewhere in a settings menu or something like 1500x1250 for example?

The picker to curves looks definitely awesome and a totally different approach. I’m going have a deeper look on it
Thank you

[Kosta]

Hello, @Rafael Do you plan to add a snap option? Then it would be so much easier to arrange all the buttons… Snap for the move and the scale
Thank you