User Interface
A user interface provides functionality for users for a specific program. Most programs provide sufficient functionality, but often custom tools need to be developed to provide greater use and/or ease.
As of Winter 2013, the two main programs BYU Animation uses for our films are Autodesk Maya and Side Effects Houdini. This page will describe the additional functionality for the user interface developed in our production pipeline. More to come soon. These are saved in current versions of Maya and Houdini called Ownaya
Within Maya, the Owned production pipeline has created a number of buttons to use:
- Brent Button (Brent's face): gives you an inspirational quote from Brent. Now get back to work.
- Check Out Button (Down arrow): takes you to a list of assets that are available to checkout.
- Check In Button (Up arrow): takes the asset that is currently checked out, saves the changes in the repository, and releases the asset for others to use.
- Discard Button (Trash can): releases the asset for others to use without saving the changes in the repository.
- Alembic Button (Alembic logo): tags object for alembic export. More on this later.
- Rollback Button (Cinammon roll?): rolls back the current asset to a previous version. More on this later.
Each film has a repository that stores all of the film's assets: geometry, textures, sounds, shots, lighting, etc. To prevent two people working on the same asset at the same time (and causing all kinds of problems), only one copy of an asset is available to work on at a particular time. This is where the Check In/Check Out buttons comes in.
When someone presses the Check Out button, this menu appears:
This is a list of all of the assets being produced for Owned. Notice that there are options near the bottom of the menu to switch being lists of geometry, rigging, and animation. The Get Info button displays a window that describes if an asset is currently checked out, who last checked in the asset and at what time.
When an asset is selected, the asset will then be loaded into Maya.
This also tags the asset so it cannot be checked out by anyone else until the asset is checked back in. Notice also that the Maya .mb file is saved in your users file in the repository. This is one way to retrieve a file when working on it later. When an asset is checked back in, an empty folder remains in the sub-directory. (That is the case in the below image.)
Multiple items can be checked out at any given time. For the sake of everyone else, be judicious and timely with what you have checked out so it is available for others to use. If two items are checked out after another session, clicking "Check Out" will return the asset back to Maya, albeit without any changes that were made after its' initial checkout. (Is this true?)
When you are finished working on the asset, clicking the Check In button will commit a version of the asset to the repository, and update the information for who last checked out the geometry (you). For your edification: notice in the image below that when an asset is checked in, that version of the asset is saved in a new folder in the repository. ("v20" was created when Abbey's controller was checked in.) This allows us to reference past versions if something in the future goes wrong. See the section on the Rollback button for more information.
![Example of source folder version being saved.] (https://students.cs.byu.edu/~beisbeis/owned/wiki/images/checkOutVersion.png)
