What I think is the minimum that needs to be in the ‘artist’ view. When it opens up
List of instances and ability to toggle them on and off. (practically the same as instances now, but maybe nicer design.)
Any optional extractors
When it runs
progress bar, ideally stating what it’s just doing
After it finishes
Any failed plugins so we can run actions on them, look at the problems and deal with them.
Actually concerning the plugins that show up in the ‘artist’ view. A simple flag in the plugin stating if it should show might be ideal. artist_view = True just like we use order, optional etc. That way developer could control what the artist will see. I might want to show them for example extractors that get the main data out as .abc, .obj. .ma, where some of those might be optional but not necessarily.
When we transfer assets between softwares artists like to choose what they are exporting. Also I’d like them to know what is their output, so it’s not fully magical in the BG
I imagined it specifically useful for the Extractors (or even Integrators) if the Integrator has some Action to explore the integrated content on disk. So they might right-click the final output and “browse that location”. Where of course browsing that location could be “showing it” through a proprietary asset management system when required, as usual Actions can be anything really. Just keeping in mind that some functionality from the “overview” would transfer to the “artist view”.
Apologies that I’ve only skimmed this thread. With regards to plugin clutter, I feel like this could be solved just by grouping the plugins by collectors, validators, extractors and integrators. So by default an artist only sees 4 tasks in the list, and if one of them fails, the group could be automatically expanded to show the details of which plugins failed and why. I think this has the added benefit of drawing attention to the CVEI paradigm, since it’s core to the pyblish workflow. Already I’ve starting prefixing plugins with "Collect: " etc. so that it’s clear where the splits are between phases of the publish. I’d prefer that to an artist view, since in this case you’d be organizing information and keeping it accessible rather than hiding it.
