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Welcome to the preview release of our new File Manager app. This app provides a lot of the functionality of the previous File Manager but also improves it in a number of ways following the feedback we've received from you.
Full documentation will be coming soon but in the meantime, here are a few things you should know about this preview release.
Before diving in, please be aware that this is a preview release and as such we don't recommend using it in production just yet! It's likely that there will be bugs and just in case they are of the more serious variety (the sort that cause crashes!) we'd prefer you to play it safe.
There are currently a few use-cases that aren't fully supported by this app yet. We do intend to add support for them in the near future so if you are affected by any of these then please let us know and we'll make sure we contact you when support is added.
- 3ds Max and Motionbuilder Support - File performance is slower in these DCCs under Windows compared to Maya and Nuke.
- Perforce/Versionless files - The app is still to go through testing with the Perforce workflow so it is very likely that it won't work.
- Nuke Studio - Nuke Studio is not supported yet.
- Hiero - Hiero 1.8.2 is supported, but not 9.0vX.
Additionally, the app is still going through internal QA and testing so you may encounter problems with other DCC's that we haven't found yet!
Some of the things we've changed from the previous file manager include
- We've removed the Change Work Area dialog as it was a clunky work-flow and also became very slow to use when a project has a significant number of Assets, Shots or Tasks.
- Instead, when opening and saving work, it is now possible to navigate to a different Work Area using the My Tasks list and configurable Entity Trees on the left of the main UI.
- Using this new navigation, it's possible to Open a file into your current Work Area (from another Work Area) and also Save directly into a different Work Area.
- We've removed the Version Up dialog and this functionality is now built directly into the Save dialog.
- We've added support for an
{extension}key in the work template.- If this is defined then the user will be given a list of file extension options which they can choose from when saving a file.
- We've sped things up a bit! The app has to spend lots of time querying the file system and Shotgun to get the list of Work Files and Publishes and we've tried to optimize this quite a bit so that everything feels snappy!
- We've added many of the UI elements found in the new Loader including search boxes, navigation buttons and breadcrumb controls. We hope you'll feel right at home in these new UI's :)
- We've added support for custom actions (these appear in the right-click context menu for a file) which can be set up by implementing your own custom_actions hook...
In order to install the app into a given environment, use the following command:
tank install_app <environment-file> <engine-name> tk-multi-workfiles2.
For example, adding the application for use with assets in Maya, you would have to run the following commands:
tank install_app project tk-maya tk-multi-workfiles2
tank install_app asset tk-maya tk-multi-workfiles2
tank install_app asset_step tk-maya tk-multi-workfiles2
and then configure the templates for each environment just like you would have done for the original workfiles application.
We strongly recommend also updating tk-framework-shotgunutils and tk-framework-qtwidgets. You can do so by running the following commands:
tank updates ALL ALL tk-framework-shotgunutils
and
tank updates ALL ALL tk-framework-qtwidgets.
Whilst this new app does have some different settings to the old File Manager app, it does share some of the important ones and this means that the two apps can work together when installed into the same configuration.
In order for the File Manager to be able to open/save files from/to different Work Areas, it needs to be able to find the templates and other settings that are configured for it in different environments to the one it is currently running in. The new File Manager will first look for it's own settings in the different environment but if it can't find them then it will fall back to the settings for the old File Manager.
This means that you can install the new File Manager into a single environment (alongside the old one) for testing and everything should still work as expected.
We'd really love to hear your feedback on this new App. What do you like? What don't you like? And what would you like to see improved or added?
Please send any feedback or suggestions you have to [email protected] - it will be very gratefully received!