Using the animation editor and working with animations is a very cumbersome process. A lot has been done in recent months to improve it, but there is still a lot to be desired. This thread is my two birds with one stone shot at addressing my problems with the editing and creation process in its current state.
The following are in no particular order:
Opening the Editor
As a developer it is overly complicated to begin working with the animation editor. Creating rigs isn’t bad, but it does take a bit of loading time. The UI is a little dated but really there isn’t anything wrong with this process. Actually opening the animation editor is a different story.
Currently opening the editor has two major flaws:
- It needs to be double tapped
- The default widget size is to small.
The double tap might be a bug or some oversight, but regardless every time I click the editor plugin button and I don’t see the editor show up I think something is broken. It’s not a good experience and it isn’t a behavior I think anybody should be allowed to grow accustomed to.
The only way I’ve gotten the editor to immediately open is if the widget was docked in the previous studio session. Docking memory for this widget seems to be hit and miss. It works sometimes, and won’t others. Where sometimes it’ll remember where it was and open up hidden under another widget, other times it just opens floating in the middle of the studio screen. Even then if I click the editor button the expectation is that the docked widget will pop up to the foreground, not stay hidden behind other docked widgets:
A double tap will bring the nested widget to the foreground. Simple put in any circumstance it shouldn’t take two clicks to open the setup screen for the editor.
I’m not sure if scaling has anything to do with this, but for reference I’m on a 3440x1440 34 inch monitor with no DPI scaling. When I do actually get the editor to show itself I’m greeted with:
Okay and Help are totally cut off, and the window is always this small and never remains docked. This one is pretty self explanatory, I shouldn’t have to resize it to see the buttons.
While not huge issues fixing both of these UX problems would result in developers being able to jump right into the creation process instead of having to set up the set up window first. Sure they’re small points but small things add up, and I’ve gotten plenty frustrated at this set up process.
The Joint Properties Cluster
As a developer the Joint Properties control cluster is confusing and misleading. By the clusters name one would assume they’re similar to the kinds of properties on other objects, readable and editable text fields. They are not.
Typing any values into any of the 6 text boxes will result in the selected joint being transformed on that axis by the amount given, then the box returning to a value of 0. Any other property (Part.Position for instance) would have that axis set to the given value, and it would then read what the current value of that axis is.
All of this confusion and needless discovery could be removed by either renaming the control cluster from Joint Properties to something more true to function, or by reworking the text fields to work more like how property editing does elsewhere. The bonus to reworking the control cluster being we as developers would gain increased awareness of the position and rotation values of a joint, and we would gain increased precision when editing them.
Renaming Keyframes
As a developer renaming keyframes is a confusing process. It took me quite some time to figure out where I needed to go inside the editor to rename a keyframe. Renaming keyframes is a huge part of properly using animations, and it should not be a feature placed in an obscure location like it currently is.
In the most recent iteration of the editor a button has been made to let us do this in a fairly sensical location. The problem is it doesn’t work in the way you’d think. Right clicking the main node of a keyframe on your timeline now gives us a Rename Keyframe button that isn’t clickable.
In order to make it a clickable button you must select one of the joint nodes of a keyframe
This has been a feature that has been reported and overlooked for a while now, and it still hasn’t been gotten right:
Exporting and Updating
As a developer it is frustrating to interact with the export dialog for two main reasons:
- Animations are assets with web pages, we’re not given the webpage link anymore.
- Copying just the numbers (the important part) of upload links is impossible.
Uploading a new animation currently results in this dialog. What is missing is the website URl for the animation that contains it’s ID. We used to have it, and getting the ID for your animation used to be as simple as copying it from the text field. Now in order to get that ID we have to go to the library page on to the website, or export and update the animation we just posted.
Updating a previously made animation give us this dialog. Seen here and not above is the link to the animation containing the ID numbers. The problem comes when you try to select just the numbers:
- Clicking anywhere on this text field results in the entire thing being selected.
- Trying to highlight just the numbers results in the entire thing being selected.
Having to swap copy the entire field, paste it in some other text editor or into an animation ID property, and then edit out the URL so I only have the numbers is a needless chore that frustrates me every time I run into it. Sure it’s small but that doesn’t change how annoying it is.
I can repro both listed behaviors 100% of the time on a windows 10 computer running studio version 0.355.0.241665.
Closing
All observations and reports in this thread were done on 9/24/2018 on studio version version 0.355.0.241665 on a windows 10 computer.
I really wanna love the animation editor, a lot has been done to improve it and I’m excited for its future. I personally don’t make animations so my experiences are largely with the import and export ends. I have no doubt in my mind that the actual editing and timelining process has its quirks and bugs too, but I wanted to bring to light and focus on the issues I have with my use cases.
