Organise Actions into Group Folders

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:08 am

I would love to be able to organise actions into sub-folders
Things are quickly getting out of hand over here!

Edit> Would be good to be able to rearrange too,
drag and drop to change the order of the actions in the list
Actions are an awesome function, would be great to be able to
organise them and make the Actions window fully functional.

I'm organising phoneme actions and also poses for eyes, and blinks

So far I have

Rest
Smile
Grin
A I
Eee
O
U
C d g
Ch, Sh
F V
Th
L
M B P
W Q

and next I'll be adding

Blink

Eyes forward
Eyes down
Eyes up
etc with 6 more eye poses

And these are just generic default poses!
What happens once I start adding more specific stuff?
I'm going to have a list of actions so long it's going to be ridiculous!

Is there a limit to the number of actions you can have?

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 2:54 am

Couldn't a lot of those be done with interpolating switch layers?

You can also separate them a bit by what layer you create them in. Actions only exist for that layer and any of it's child layers, so depending on how you setup your character, you may be able to do this.

But yeah, the ability to sort and group actions would be helpful.

madrobot · Post by **madrobot** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 5:44 am

Thanks Synthsin

I do like the way you're thinking
but I think that arranging actions but nesting them in layers
(say for example blinks and eye moves on an "eyes" folder,
phonemes on a "head" or "mouth" layer)
is false economy because I'll have to add
"excavate correct layer to access actions" to my workflow,
if you know what I mean.

Also creating actions this way would quickly become a nightmare
as I'm having enough trouble remembering to click on the root folder
between selecting layers to key point motion for each action.
If that root folder changed depending on what category of action
I was working on...

Sorting and grouping would be great,
imagine though if we could create action "palettes"
custom action windows. That would be sweet.

In the mean time I've used Panel Saver to set up a custom layout
with a long actions window running between the main and
the style windows.
Which works fine, I can see all the actions as one long list

Could you explain what you mean by
"interpolating switch layers"?

Is there an award for the most use of quotation marks in a single post?

synthsin75 · Post by **synthsin75** » Wed Sep 17, 2008 12:14 pm

Many of those actions you mentioned cluttering up your actions window are usually done with switch layers. As long as you make each switch from the same vector points, you can check the interpolate switch box in the switch layer's settings menu.

The only thing is you'd lose control over the interpolation mode and you'd have to hunt up each switch layer.