Rai López wrote: ↑Sat Feb 03, 2024 1:25 am
About the contextual workspaces, well, I'm not sure if you are referring to this or to something more elaborated, but I always liked the way it's solved in Cinema 4D, where basically you have a contextual "Properties" panel/window that shows all controls/info about the object you are working on and it happens to be very intuitive and powerful (for offering more space, tabs, etc.). But, again, Moho has its own consecrated concept more based on the currently selected tool and its toolbar and, although it can be more limited in space and therefore possibilities, I don't know if we can expect/need big changes on that.
By contextual workspaces I'm referring to something even simpler, because Moho already have one workspace. No new panel or section would be needed. Maybe workspace is not the right word, I think layout could be the right one (English is not my first language).
Right now, Moho already have layouts but only one, the "current" one. We know that because the panels are always like we left them, even between sessions.
This layout is saving 3 properties for each of the 7 panels: the position of each panel, their "open/closed" state and their "docked/undocked" state.
So my proposal would be to let the users save not only this current layout like now, but a few. So users can save a "drawing layout", a "bone animation layout", etc to their needs and tastes. Maybe I want the style panel open when I'm drawing but the timeline panel closed, but maybe I want exactly the opposite when I'm animating bones. Right now, the user would have to manually close, open, position, dock and undock panels each time he wants to adapt the layout to the current task, which in practice means nobody does it, and the biggest problem is that this means Moho needs to be extra careful with the size and the clutter of each panel knowing that users will have to deal with most of them all the time, even if they are not relevant for the currect task.
The simpler version of custom layouts would consist in being able to save more than one layout, and being able to assign shortcuts to those custom layouts. Because Moho already saves one layout, this shouldn't be hard to do.
The better version of custom layouts would be contextual custom layouts. This is the same but the user wouldn't need to memorise and use shortcuts to change the layout, it would automatically change depending on the current task, which would be identified by the current tool or the current selected layer type. So Moho would have a "contextual activation" option that you can enable for each custom layout and there you could assign a tool or a layer type as activator of the custom layout. The user would save its layout without timeline panel but with style panel as "drawing layout" and then he would enable the free hand tool as contextual activator, for example.
Now I'm thinking I want this so bad I may actually be able to do it using keyboard macros, so when I use the shortcut for the freehand tool, a macros software could automatically activate the shortcut for "close timeline panel" for example... but then I would have to create macros for all the other tools to bring the timeline panel back again... so maybe not. Enough procrastination for today.