# Bone Collections Feedback

*Feedback from Raymond Luc & colleagues at Dillon Goo studio.*

The [original document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ujSCaMJdYPNaqPpDNlAkbkbRz8SDZZTwmWVtAIXFbJc/edit) was at Google Docs.

:::info
Replies are timestamped (roughly, no need to update the 'minutes' field for every reply) and marked with the name of whoever wrote it. If you reply, please pick a unique colour for yourself for easy identification.
:::

## The soloing system:

At the moment, the current Solo and eyeball icon system feel redundant with each other since they both control the visibility of bones in a similar way.

> Solo and Eyeball are intentionally different.
>
> The eyeball is the 'normal' visibility, which is meant to be used by animators on a regular basis to show/hide what they want to work on, either directly or via some rig-specific UI. This is also a necessary feature to have, because of compatibility with the old armature layer visibility system.
>
> The Solo button is a new feature, and is there to quickly isolate certain controls without changing the regular visibility toggles. As in, you can use 'solo' to view certain controls, and then go back to whatever visibility setup you had before.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

The Solo button is currently additive, which doesn’t feel quite right since it's supposed to “solo” the bones. If the user wants to add to which layers are being solo’d, shift clicking should work like the rest of blender functions. But just clicking should solo that layer and turn off any other solo’d layers.

> This is standard behaviour in any digital audio workstation, where 'solo' is always additive (but also something like ctrl+click to un-solo the rest is standard, which Blender doesn't have). I agree shift-click to add to solo, and click to 'uniquely solo' would be a more consistent UI.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

Ideally what we’re looking for is a quicker way to solo a rig collection without it being additive. If the user has 5 layers “soloed” using the stars, and they want to “solo” a new layer and disable the 5 currently soloed layers, it requires 6 clicks now, but used to only require 1 in 3.6.
The Eyeball Icon only works if there are no solo stars active, which means you also have to deactivate several solo stars just to return to the eyeball functionality again, which is unintuitive.

> This is why there is an 'Un-solo All' operator. And yes, I do realise that having one click in 3.6 is still faster, so that's something to work on.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

### Proposal

We could merge the two visibility icons back to just being the eyeball icon, but having a hotkey modifier (like Shift or Ctrl) when clicking to isolate the collection. This would be the preferred solution based on popular opinion on our team.

> This would remove the "temporarily isolate and losslessly go back" feature, which was also requested by some animators.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

Alternatively, we can make it so that the solo star icons only have one active at a time when clicking new ones. We could also add Shift + click functionality to additively enable collections in the star layer in this case.

> I agree this would be nice. The problem here basically is the UI code in Blender. Currently it's just using the "draw this property" function, which gives no possibility to handle shift/ctrl differently. I'll have to discuss with the UI team on how to do this.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

## Return of the resizability of the window:

In 4.0 there was a small menu at the bottom that lets you search by name and a handle to expand the whole menu itself. In 4.1 that menu has disappeared along with the handle. This makes scrolling down in the properties panel more tedious as you have more bone collections.
This seems to already be on the radar! But we believe it is a high priority usability feature.

> This is indeed in the works by the UI module.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

And there’s no longer a search or filter functionality.

> At the top of the properties panel there is a search box. You can reach it with Ctrl+F as well. I know it's not ideal, as it doesn't filter, just search/highlight, but at least it's *something*.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

If removing the star icons based on the previous feature suggestion can make it easier to reimplement the previous implementation of the search/filter/resizing feature, that would be convenient, and may be another benefit of the previous suggestion.

> Nope, that has no bearing on this. It's simply due to the "flat list" UI component (older and more mature / feature-full) getting replaced by the Tree View UI component (brand new and still lacking some features) to support nested bone collections.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

## Custom ToolTips:

A function that would be immensely helpful is one to add custom tooltips to bone collections as you hover your mouse over them. It would allow you to comment what the bones in the layer are supposed to be doing rather than making a very long rig layer name with limited explanation.

This would be great for pipelines with more than one rigging artist, from the point of view being “I opened this rig for the first time and don’t know where anything is or how to edit it”.

Ex: A face rig may have 5 different Mechanism layers with different functions, so being able to separate those out with a prime explanation of how they work would increase the communication between the teams.

This is based on the fact that custom properties already have custom tooltips. So we’re hoping that feature is borrowable.

> I think that's a nice idea. It would make the UI for managing bone collections more complex though, as suddenly there's more than just the name to be edited. You can't just double-click a tooltip to edit it ;-) Something like a pop-over where you edit both the name and the tooltip could work, but I'm not really a fan of those (too easy to dismiss & loose changes, among other things). I'm open for suggestions.
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

>Ah yeah, I agree popups are not ideal. A quick suggestion that *might* work----we could potentially have a custom property automatically spawned on creation for each Bone Collection of String type that users can fill in anytime if they simply expand the Custom Properties. Which in theory could be referenced when hovering over the Bone Collections and displaying them effectively as tooltips for each collection. Not sure how easy it would be to code, but it should be a clean UI solution that's more reliable than popups.
>
> [name=Dillon] [color=#65e660] [time=2024-05-31 03:30 CEST]

## Action Constraint

*Unrelated to Bone collections, but a feature request from Dillon and Sebastian after developing our hand macro control*

The Action Constraint should have a "Replace" mix mode so we can have a Pose Constraint option built into the Action Constraint features without having to create a separate constraint entirely.

At the moment, our solution for "pose forcing" is to duplicate bones in the pose we want and then copy transforms them into those predefined bones which is inefficient and probably reduces performance with extraneous bones. We’ve also setup drivers to try and turn off every single bone constraint except the last Action Constraint, but again it is very tedious. And in those situations still is only additive to existing transformations.

In theory, simply adding a Replace option for the mix here would simplify all of those methods into a single drop down.

Nathan did offer an alternative solution with multiple constraints but it also requires a long setup process and feels a bit awkward to prepare. (using limit loc/rot/scale constraints set to local space to reset the pose of the bone then putting the action constraint afterwards).

> I *think* I understand. What makes it a bit tough is that you're not describing the problem, just the workarounds you need to solve it, which is kind of using a shadow to describe an object.
> So to make sure I understand: you want the Action Constraint to *just set the bone transforms to whatever the Action says it should be*, regardless of whatever constraint or animated pose was there before?
> [name=Sybren] [color=#907bf7] [time=2024-05-30 10:00 CEST]

> Your interpretation is correct yes, the Replace mix mode should ideally enforce the pose regardless of all other constraints or animation data, similar to the Replace option from Copy Transforms constraint
> [name=Sebs] [color=#3C9CD4] [time=2024-05-30 15:00 CEST]