Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

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Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Thu Sep 24, 2020 5:20 pm

I was grumbling to myself the other day trying to find in the geometry->clothes tab a particular asset that I knew I downloaded but was having a tough time finding it "gee what if this were organized in a set of folders?"

Not sure how much of a PITA it would be to do that but autosorting by tags might be nice.

Another random thought: a plugin that would allow you to edit the tags for assets (clothing, hair, etc) might be a good idea.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby loki1950 » Thu Sep 24, 2020 7:13 pm

You should the tags they are already in the code as for editing can't you use a plane text editor all you need the old why reinvent the wheel ;)

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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Fri Sep 25, 2020 2:36 pm

loki1950 wrote:
why reinvent the wheel ;)



Same reason I don't use wheels meant for railroad cars on my automobile if all I'm doing is driving on roads. :-D

Point taken though I really don't know why I keep forgetting MHCLO files are plain text.

Still it would be nice if there was a folder type (or tree?) display with clothing sorted by type.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby RobBaer » Sat Sep 26, 2020 12:48 pm

SaltyCowdawg wrote: ...

Still it would be nice if there was a folder type (or tree?) display with clothing sorted by type.


We have occasionally addressed the sorting issue within the program via the tagging system, but you seem to be talking about it in terms of storage on disk. Maybe you could say a little more about why this would be beneficial. Editing?

If you mean sorting within the right panel, that is a different problem than the order on disk. Here the issue is writing a useful specification for how the sort should be done. Aranuvir has already made some nice fixes that make the tagging system more (boolean) flexible (see settings), but that does not solve the problem of a standard dictionary of hierarchical tags. To date asset tagging is a little random. How would your understanding of "sorted by type" be specified? Just male vs female vs neutral? Using some of the existing tags? What else? How would the hierarchy be specified? What would we do with assets in the repository that don't have standard hierarchy tags when we do the sort?
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Sat Sep 26, 2020 4:02 pm

RobBaer wrote:
We have occasionally addressed the sorting issue within the program via the tagging system, but you seem to be talking about it in terms of storage on disk. Maybe you could say a little more about why this would be beneficial. Editing?



Gets back to my original "problem statement." Trying to find an asset that got downloaded from User Assets and use it can be a trying experience at times. Doesn't help that my eyesight isn't what it used to be but that's my problem.

RobBaer wrote: Using some of the existing tags? What else? How would the hierarchy be specified? What would we do with assets in the repository that don't have standard hierarchy tags when we do the sort?


On one hand I didn't want to influence the actual solution with my ideas but I guess I will anyway.

Sorting would be done recognizing certain standard tags such as gender related tags (male, female, unisex etc) and generic clothing types (shirt, blouse, pants, skirt, shoes, jewelry etc) and a catchall for things that don't have tags associated with them that MH understands.

I've the tags check boxes on the left hand panel searching before and in one case I was looking for a dress that did not have "dress" as one of its tags and admittedly this won't help in a folder system either. So that comes to the question of tagging which I originally asked "why not a tag editor similar to the material editor? Of course I had overlooked the fact (forgotten?) that MHCLO files are text files I can edit in emacs just fine.

So really... I guess the solution here is for me to edit assets that don't have proper tags and go about enforcing tag standards on the assets in my library.

Brings up a question: what is the RIGHT way of sharing edits I make to assets. I've fixed things in the past like bad paths to texture files to get some assets to work. Now with MakeSkin I may be editing the material files for broken assets including things like adding normals and bump maps for assets lacking such.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby punkduck » Sun Sep 27, 2020 8:13 am

Well Salty, I know the problem and we had discussed that topic already in the team more than a year ago,

Elv and I created a list of tags, which we would consider "official" and then allow additional ones.

This is now partially implemented by predefining tags in new makeclothes. There is the choice between male or female, so men or women will not appear.

I also changed code to present some kind of tag editor inside makehuman:

tag-editor.jpg
proposal for tag editor


But in the version I did, the tags were inserted in sqlite (which comes with python and works for all OS) and were not written back to the .mhclo files.

So in this case we have to rewrite parts and that should not be included in 1.2.0

[edit: did a re-upload, because image was not visible] If we do that my proposal was also to replace our home-brewed cache files with sqlite tables also. The numbers meant, that these segments will follow when one scroll down. Maybe this layout is not really feasible for a tag editor, but it was a quick and dirty way to write it with our framework, I only explained the principle to the team and as I wrote this was a proposal.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby RobBaer » Sun Sep 27, 2020 3:18 pm

@punkduck has provided us with a nice starting point for an open discussion. The categories he shows cover a large majority of what is in the current asset repository.

My own opinion is that using a database approach is very reasonable if it is paired with a robust categorization scheme and a robust editor that gives users something as usable as a text editor to customize tags as needed. The one suggestion I would have for the editor interface would be to make the categories a little more hierarchical in the editing interface, but @punkduck shares us with a "low-hanging fruit" linearized version that might be easier to implement with the current interface. Perhaps there needs to be an NA choice for some of the finer grained categories, (e.g., does casual vs business even apply to swords; are there male and female or unisex swords?). Thinking carefully about such things can improve workflows.

@Saltydog makes the important comment that it would be nice to give users a way to submit fixes to the tags of existing assets that would be easy to review and propagate back into the master database so that future users of those assets would benefit. A "submit edit for review" button might be a start to such a process.

Given the wonderful growth of the repository over the last 3-5 years, I think this is an important area for the community to share their own thoughts and comments. I invite those of you with ideas, thoughts, and opinions to share them here.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby MTKnife » Mon Sep 28, 2020 2:49 am

The directory structure is also an issue: because some contributors choose names that are unrelated to the names displayed in the app, it can sometimes take a very long time to hunt down an asset that, for example, you want to create a new material for, A "properties" tab/button for each asset might help.
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Re: Feature request: folders for the clothing geometries?

Postby punkduck » Tue Sep 29, 2020 3:24 pm

well I uploaded the demo-picture again, I didn't know it was not visible ... because I was always logged in and then I have the permission to see the picture :roll:

The name of the asset and the filename are different, but the internal name inside .mhclo file is also not used, the author is mentioned in the file but not shown, etc. So my idea was to fill a small database. Similar like we recreate the cache file when a new asset is added one can leave out the cache files and do that with a database. One column in the database would be the filename and other columns can be used for presentation or searching, even an own alias name for the piece of cloth would be a possibility, etc. It is flexible.

I had a long discussion with Elv about the categories. Before we decide for details we should consider the main topic: what are we using the assets for? Mainly we have two possibilities:

  • for a random character in a crowd (in the city, soldiers, beach ...)
  • for a specific character, like e.g. a "zombie hunter"

For a bunch of characters in a crowd mid center of a town we need e.g. casual clothes. Lingerie, swimwear or even domina outfit would not (yet?) be that appropriate :mrgreen:

When I create a special character I tag all the clothes needed with his/her name. That does not help for the crowd. For a crowd we need main categories, which are gender, time, is it used for play (theater, cosplay, fantasy), sports, profession etc. Of course it was a proposal for a discussion.

I do not know if the quick and dirty solution in the picture would be the best for an editor. Since 15 hours I try to figure out how I get these two scroll-boxes (left and right side) working with PyQt5.15 library, This triple layer concept with a "self made" scroll-area (viewport, QGridLayout with Widgets) is hard to understand imho. Maybe there is a solution to solve that, but I guess sth changed internally and we have to rethink that anyway. A tag editor does not need a character in the middle, but I need the piece of cloth selected when I change or add tags (or information).
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