Survey: (Max and Mays) user opinions on Maya's outliner

PaK

Hey guys, I crave your invaluable perspective once again...

I am most interested in old school max users opinions here, but all feedback is welcome.

So... the outliner. Do we love it? Do we hate it? Those of you who use Max and love it have an equivalent, and it's called the selection tool ("select by name")

Tell me what you think of the outliner, here are some things to think about when responding:

[*] Do you even use the outliner?

[*] Describe for me what you think the outliner was design to do

[*] What is it's greatest strength?

[*] What is it's greatest weakness?

[*] What would be your first new feature if you could add one

[*] What do you wish it did differently?


As always, I greatly appreciate your valuable insight. I do my best with my fellow Polycounters input

-R

scanning_factor

hehe, i hate it, but you know me, i'm hypergraph/hypershader all the way. . .

PaK

So far, this is what the dudes here say:

• Too cluttered
• Needs a quick yet detailed and robust filtering mechanism (I don't know is this is actually available or not, i think ti might be)

SHEPEIRO

invaluable to level artists IMO, esp with complicated gameplay systems involved.

but agree that a filtering system would be the first thing i would ask for. if the filtering was linked to the layer system aswell that would be a bonus

Emil Mujanovic

I use it on a daily basis. Basically just echo what SHEPEIRO said.

-caseyjones

Ryno

Very useful, but cluttered. Just what other people have said, it needs a filtering system.

Max's new Scene Explorer (Formerly Select by Name) is basically an Outliner, with the ability to filter, allows options to Hide, Freeze, turn on and off lights, and a bunch of other stuff. Maya's Outliner needs some of these options. Some basic layer controls would be great too.

Illusions

Do you even use the outliner? - Yes, all the time.
Describe for me what you think the outliner was design to do - Exactly what it looks to do. Provide a list of everything in the scene so you can quickly select it.
What is it's greatest strength? - Just being there.
What is it's greatest weakness? - Needs more filters.
What would be your first new feature if you could add one - Being able to group things in the outliner without having to group them in the actual scene. (For instance, so I can put all my geometry in one folder, without having it appear as a group when I select stuff in the active view).
What do you wish it did differently? - Have a search bar at the bottom that as you typed filtered out unrelated items, and have support for wildcards. So if I begin typing "arm" I'd see it only list things like 'armor' , 'arm' etc. Or if I typed *GEO, it would list anything I suffixed with GEO regardless of what came before it.

adam

Moved to Technical Talk

MoP

The Outliner is pretty awesome. I use it all the time, and I'm an old-school Max user.

Someone already wrote an Outliner maxscript for Max 2008, which is cool, because while the new Scene Explorer is quite handy, it's also fairly slow and not integrated very well (such as not being able to single-click select anything that's in view, or highlighting selected items).

Something I've been vaguely looking at recently to improve the Outliner, is to get it to display Layers in the same was as it shows Groups.
Currently if you turn off the "Show only DAG objects" option, then you get a ton of unnecessary crap, but you can see the Layers, but the Layers are down in a whole different section, and show all the objects in the Layer just as a single heirarchy step away (so if you've got an object in a group in a layer, it will show the object and the group side-by-side rather than correctly nested). This is quite silly, and something I'd like to sort out.

Plus I wanted to add the "visible" and "template" toggles (like Max's Hide / Freeze things in the Layer Manager) to the Outliner so you can hide or freeze any object, group or layer in a single click, all in the Outliner. That'd make it pretty much perfect IMHO.

Whargoul

Illusions wrote: »

What do you wish it did differently? - Have a search bar at the bottom that as you typed filtered out unrelated items, and have support for wildcards. So if I begin typing "arm" I'd see it only list things like 'armor' , 'arm' etc. Or if I typed *GEO, it would list anything I suffixed with GEO regardless of what came before it.

Isn't that what it has at the top? It doesn't update as you type, but you can put obj* up there to filter everything that starts with "obj". I

Illusions

Whargoul wrote: »

Isn't that what it has at the top? It doesn't update as you type, but you can put obj* up there to filter everything that starts with "obj". I

I want it to work better than that...as it stands now its not very useful, unless you have an absolute ton of stuff...that, and its case sensitive, and doesn't look for similarities, but exact likeness, like if I have something named group_01, and I type 'group', it doesn't come up, I have to type group*

Mark Dygert

MoP wrote: »

The Outliner is pretty awesome. I use it all the time, and I'm an old-school Max user.

Someone already wrote an Outliner maxscript for Max 2008, which is cool, because while the new Scene Explorer is quite handy, it's also fairly slow and not integrated very well (such as not being able to single-click select anything that's in view, or highlighting selected items).

Something I've been vaguely looking at recently to improve the Outliner, is to get it to display Layers in the same was as it shows Groups.
Currently if you turn off the "Show only DAG objects" option, then you get a ton of unnecessary crap, but you can see the Layers, but the Layers are down in a whole different section, and show all the objects in the Layer just as a single heirarchy step away (so if you've got an object in a group in a layer, it will show the object and the group side-by-side rather than correctly nested). This is quite silly, and something I'd like to sort out.

Plus I wanted to add the "visible" and "template" toggles (like Max's Hide / Freeze things in the Layer Manager) to the Outliner so you can hide or freeze any object, group or layer in a single click, all in the Outliner. That'd make it pretty much perfect IMHO.

Agreed.

PaK

What about customization. Does anyone care about that? or is it overkill. I would love to set extra attr's and then organize based on those.

This way, a team could set up game-specific properties and the organize by type.

bugo

Heh, I use outliner all the time, It´s the window that organize your file and you have everything there you want to select about. I don´t like to use Layers too, most of the time I just press a group in the outliner and hide/unhide. But that´s MY way. I know alot of people dont use it too... Riggers use it alot to select bones, see the IK/FK inputs.

Mark Dygert

Customization is a great idea as long as it isn't mandatory.

In 3dsMax I use another layer manager its called the Onion, in addition to name selection groups and the new select object by name dialog but its slow to launch especially with heavy scenes. There have been times I have launched it, said forget this and while its still launching been able to select all the elements I wanted one at a time before it came up, thats pretty useless to me. Sometimes if you leave it up it won't refresh, which means shutting it down and relaunching it, again having to wait total drag.

The Onion lets you toggle between two textures on an object, pretty handy when doing UV layouts and you want to use a custom checker pattern, not the procedural B/W 3dsMax checker. The onion is also great because you can arrange the layers how you like by drag drop, in the standard 3dsMax layer manager you have to get creative with the names...

Illusions

If you really wanted to do this in Maya, you could do it with render layers, but I'm not sure what functionality the Onion has beyond swapping textures. Just assign your objects to a different render layer and apply a new material over-ride.

Ryno

MoP wrote: »

..., because while the new Scene Explorer is quite handy, it's also fairly slow and not integrated very well (such as not being able to single-click select anything that's in view, or highlighting selected items).

If you bring up a Scene Explorer and turn on Sync Selection (next to Lock Selection button, to the right of Selection Sets), it'll do this. Make sure to bring up the Scene Explorer via the Menu Bar, and not the Select By Name dialog from the toolbar, because the Select by Name version doesn't have that option and closes immediately upon selection.

MoP

Ah cool, thanks Ryno!
I thought there must be a way to do that!

Ryno

No prob. I always feel a little silly clicking through all of the new buttons each time I upgrade, but I occasionally find something worthwhile. No point in others having to suffer through the clicking.