Feedback needed on UI designs - USD Selection modes

[scottrenaud]

Hey everyone,

We’re taking a moment to revisit the USD selection mode design to address certain issues and confusions, namely:

• Point Instancer selection modes are also applying to instanceable instances
• If a point instancer instance is selected, it cannot be combined with a kind selection mode
• Competing selection modes makes for an unpredicatable selection result (ex: Point Instancer or Prototype + Assembly will look up the tree beyond the Point Instancer or prototype)
• It’s not so clear that some Kind options include others
  ex: Assemblies are also considered Groups

Our Proposal

Watch here!

USD_selection_modes_design.mp4

• A single selection mode at a time will make it easier to understand and better reflect what you can actually select in the scene
• Simplifying selection for point instances and instances
• Setting it to “Prim” and clicking on an instance will select the Point Instancer
• Setting it to “Instances” will allow you to select any type of instance (Point Instancer or Instanceable reference)
• Relabeling “None” to “Prim”
• Using indents to communicate when a kind includes others through extension

Questions we have for you

1. Would you change anything with these designs?

2. If you set the selection mode to “Component” and you click on unstructured data that doesn’t have “Component” as a kind it will fallback to selecting the leaf prim, which is inconsistent with Maya selection modes. Do artists like this behavior? Would they want fallback selection to be an option?

3. There’s currently no way to select by a specific kind (bypassing kind inheritance), is this something artists would ever want?
   ex: set selection to “Group” and only selecting objects with kind group and not assembly

4. What do you think about the indentations?

5. Finally, we’re thinking that the UI should communicate to artists whether something is an instance or not, to help with understanding how editing them differs from non-instance prims. Do you think this would be helpful?

Thanks!
Scott
Renaud
scott.renaud@autodesk.com

[radon199]

I like the indentations, I did wonder if this will also display any site kinds added on top of the default USD kinds as well? A studio might have multiple kinds that inherit from component for example.

Having an indicator that the Prim is instanced, and not just tagged as instanceable, is nice as well.

I think if you set the kind to "group" it should select all derived kinds, that is kind of the point of the inheritance. As above, maybe I have custom component kinds and I want to select all of them, I should be able to use "component" for that.