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Why is 'D' the Play button while space is Drop selection?
Hi,
I just had some feedback in relation to the choice of default shortcuts. We don't change keymaps so we can benefit from tutorials, so maybe some can relate to this issue.
Almost every music player, video play, animation editor under the sun used spacebar to play, it's easier to reach which is what you should be doing to check your animation as much as possible. Why downgrade the status of this default to a smaller key that it further from the thumb? Even if the user hits it by accident and loses keys, they can have autokey applied to circumvent that issue.
What does 'D' make the user think of? 'DROP selection.' would make sense if you had to guess it. 'Play', not so much. Playing devil's advocate; I think of strafing right.... but to pause is to strafe further right? Is it that the D key slightly resembles a play button..? Many animators still prefer to play-pause with space. I'd be curious to know what animation apps do this with the D key, and how they justified it.
Just to give people some background I am a senior generalist versed in Blender, Modo, 3ds Max, Maya, AE, Photoshop, Krita, and several other packages over the course of my 10 years as a 2d and 3D artist in games and film. So not green horn and no stranger to industry standard keymaps.
I have a broad understanding of the entire CG workflow, and certainly spent a large portion of that time animating characters in many different styles. It's not the first time I'd posted ideas, ('[mark]' tag for slot and bone group locators) but since that post was a ghost town, I thought this time I'd flash the experience badge.
If someone finds any of this helpful I might continue posting my findings, otherwise gotta focus my time and energy where it makes the most impact
-S
This kind of topic reminded me a dark history of spine forum.
Particularly this post: http://esotericsoftware.com/forum/4-0-20-beta-Multi-box-select-keyframes-in-new-v4-Graph-14890?p=65446&hilit=+easing#p65446
That guy ended up getting the thread locked and vanished from the forum ever since.
In my experience, if the team don't adopt your suggestion in the 1st response, don't insist on convincing them. It won't end well most of the time. Especially something that would affect a lots of existing users and is configurable.
In response to your question, I could give you a response on my own perspective.
For me, I never use the D key for playback after I found out the existence of the Preview panel. I always have the preview panel opened and looping my editing animation so the dopesheet will only be used to navigate to a specific frame or when I want to play the animation in a very slow speed by dragging on the dopesheet. Thus it is good the have the space bar button do other common action such as deselecting object.
In fact, I prefer the space key to act the same as PS/CSP to pan the canvas. It got me sometimes when I try to drag the canvas after working in PS/CSP.
D for play comes from users who are used to WASD, used in most first person shooter games. I think space for deselect comes from Softimage/XSI, which some of our original team members have a lot of experience with. Ultimately they are configurable, so should not be a blocking issue.
Here's a hotkeys.txt file that uses hotkeys similar to Maya:
http://n4te.com/x/5219-hotkeys.txt
simon.h wroteWe don't change keymaps so we can benefit from tutorials, so maybe some can relate to this issue.
FWIW, tutorial videos should turn on hotkey popups with ctrl+shift+K. Hotkey popups can also be turned on via the CLI with `
keys, nice so it's harder to forget to turn them on. Also
keys-defaults` allows you to use customize hotkeys, but have the popups show the default hotkeys. That lets people make tutorials without being forced to use the default hotkeys.
While Spine may not use similar hotkeys to many apps you may be familiar with, hotkeys are very personal and most users benefit from customizing them. Even when hotkeys are somewhat similar across apps, it's usually only in a few ways and there is still some adjustment needed. For example, some use spacebar for play, others for panning.
One of the things that kills me is that I use ctrl+insert, shift+insert, and shift+delete for copy, paste, and cut. These are lesser known hotkeys but have been supported basically for all of time. Lately some apps and webpages, like Slack or Facebook, have lost these and it drives me nuts.
Sorry we missed your other post, I'll respond over there today.
@Nick, we keep an open mind and can certainly be convinced by a good argument. We put a lot of effort into explaining our reasoning for the decisions we make because that insight allows users to make productive conversation. We don't have strong opinions on every decision, but when we do our reasoning must be addressed before we will change our decisions.
Sometimes users continue to insist without addressing our reasoning. Friebel was very passionate, which is great, but also very stubborn. There are two options for interpreting the terms "in" and "out". We chose the animation focused (pose-centric) terms. He thought we should use the opposite (transition-centric) terms. In our professional opinion, that just doesn't make sense for animation theory or an animation tool. No amount of insisting can change our opinion in this particular case, but that doesn't mean we don't listen to our users. We spent a lot of time trying to have a productive discussion, but ultimately Friebel got increasingly rude. All that said, I don't like that kind of ugly confrontation on our beautiful forum and it's off topic for this thread.