What about loading poses directly from the file browser editor?

[John Keyberg]

If you don’t want to build a native pose asset library in Blender, the current workflow forces you to browse through the pop up window for your pose, which is cumbersome. Instead, we could take advantage of the file browser and navigate to the pose directly there, and maybe load it through a shortcut or a context menu entry. Also, it would be important to be able to skip all of the import options by just setting a preset before hand, or else the workflow would again be too slow.

[Alessandro Padovani]

1.7.4.2039

It is not clear what you mean, import pose already opens in the file browser and there’s presets you can use. Perhaps you need to update. The only annoying thing I can see it’s the multiple files for the same pose, which we can easily avoid by using “tip“ as filter.

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[John Keyberg]

What you are talking about is the “File View”, which is a new window that pops up when you click Import Action. I’m suggesting being able to import actions on the “File Browser“, which is an editor panel.

The workflow for building an animation using the File View is 4 steps long:

1. Open File View window by clicking on one of the import options.
2. Browse to the folder with the pose(s) you want. Which has to be done every time, since the previously used folder resets. You can bookmark a folder, which helps, but it is still another extra click.
3. Select pose(s).
4. Click import button.

What I’m suggesting with the File Browser is 1 or 2 steps long:

1. Browse to the folder with the poses you want, which only has to be done once if all the poses you want are on the same folder.
2. Select pose with shortcut.

Since it is much faster, the proposed workflow allows you to iterate poses more dynamically whilst building an animation. Not only that, but using the File Browser would preserve your view of the changes made to your character in real time, whereas the File View typically blocks your viewport.

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[Thomas Larsson]

You can turn off the folder reset with the global setting “Remember Last Folder”, so that would eliminate your step 2. Personally I find it much harder to manually find the location of a pose file deep inside the data directory and prefer to be guided to the right place by the plugin, but that is a matter of taste.

I hadn’t noticed the file browser editor before. I can browse the files from there, but it doesn’t seem possible to actually to anything with them, nor to I see where the options would go.

[John Keyberg]

Ok, I didn’t knew about that global setting. That’s useful.

For what I tested, the addon guides you to the top level folder for a category, according to what type of character you have. The File Browser workflow would allow for much more customization and flexibility.

I envision that you would set an import preset for a certain category of assets, such as pose, expression, pose library, or action, maybe on the N panel, and then you would right click an asset on the File Browser, select the import option on the menu, and it would be imported with the defined preset options. More experienced users will simply assign a shortcut for the option to skip the menu.

If the python API for the File Browser doesn’t allow importing, I guess that the code would actually have to use the original workflow behind the scenes, with the File Browser basically only used to select files.

[Thomas Larsson]

I don’t understand how this could be done. Not as a matter of the API, but how the selected file knows which tool to use on it. Do you know of any example of other addons importing files from a file browser editor, e.g. FBX or BVH files?

[John Keyberg]

Blender natively lets you drag and drop some types of file from the File Browser into some editors. For example, you can drag and drop audio and video into the Video Sequencer editor and they load as strips, or images into the Shader Editor, and they load as image textures, or also images into the 3D Viewport and they load as image Empties.

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There is also an awesome addon called Drag and Drop. It allows you to drop several file types directly from your Windows File Explorer into Blender, not from the File Browser, though. It lets you import FBX, GLB, GLTF, OBJ, MTL, X3D, WRL, ABC, PLY, STL, BVH, SVG, PNG, JPG, JPEG, TIFF, VDB, USD, USDC, USDA, DAE, BLEND, MP4, MOV, BPM, PY, DXF, HDR, EXR, PSD, and SKP.

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I am a shortcut person, so I personally find browsing menus and dragging and dropping slow by comparison. If I were the Drag and Drop creator, I would also add a shortcut for Drag and Drop on top of the current functionality: hover over the file you want and press “i“, for example. I know DAZ allows you to load DUF files directly from the Windows File Explorer too by double clicking them, which I find really convenient.

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I ended up building my own Pose Asset library inside Blender, since loading stuff from the File View pop up window is too slow for my use case, but an implementation with the File Explorer similar to Drag and Drop, or my initial proposal with the File Browser, would be better, since it would allow us to use the same library for both Blender and DAZ, or maybe even other applications, as it depends on the external folder structure on the OS’s File Explorer. It is more versatile.

how the selected file knows which tool to use on it

On Drag and Drop, if you just left click and drag, it uses a predefined default. If you right click and drag, it lets you define settings on a temporary pop-up. The DAZ importer could have a similar workflow, or it could just have a presets tab on the N panel that lets you define the active import preset. Whatever is defined there would be used by the selected file upon activating the importing operation via a context menu entry, or a shortcut. Also, if you select multiple files, it could default for a preset using Import Action instead of Import Pose.

[Thomas Larsson]

It is possible that this would be a useful addition, but it is not something that I am motivated to implement. If somebody else is interested, it should be possible to implement this functionality using the operators that the plugin defines, in particular bpy.ops.daz.import_action. See https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/import_daz/wiki/Scripting/DAZ Importer Operators.