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Very confused about order of items in the dopesheet

amcleod

So, this is something that has been driving me a bit nuts for some time... I do not at all understand how the dopesheet decides to order the list of bones.

To be clear, I'm not talking about which bones are listed/not listed in the dopesheet. I get how that works:

when the dopesheet is unlocked, (selection exists) the bones listed are: all bones in the current selection that have keyframes
when the dopesheet is unlocked, (no selection exists) the bones listed are: all bones in the skeleton that have keyframes
when the dopesheet is locked, the bones listed are: all bones that were selected when the lock was enabled (bones with keyframes only)

The thing I am confused about is the order in which the bones are listed, i.e. which bone is at the top of the list, which bone comes next, which bone is at the bottom of the list, etc.

It's completely baffling to me. Bones are not listed alphabetically. Bones are not arranged according to the skeleton hierarchy. It appears that when the dopesheet is unlocked, and no selection exists, the last bone to be selected is placed at the top of the list, but other than that I can't see any sort of organization at all.

Personally I find this makes animating a complex skeleton much more difficult than it needs to be, because the dopesheet is constantly rearranging itself. The speed and familiarity that comes with a UI element always being in the same place is missing, which drastically slows how quickly I can work. When I'm animating I constantly need to spend a couple seconds scanning the dopesheet items to figure out where the bone is located now.

I'm not asking for a fix here (although I think it would be an improvement), I'm just asking someone to explain what the actual logic is, so that I can stop being surprised/confused every time I look at the list of bones. I would much prefer to find that the bone I'm looking for is exactly where I expect it to be.

Bone ascending order

Advice on organizing layers/rows in the Editor

Nate

Thanks for finding the relevant threads. Sometimes I wonder if people ever search, you give me hope. 😉 As mentioned there, the order of the bones in the dopesheet is the order they were selected. If you find a situation where the order changes, that's a bug. Let us know how to reproduce it and we'll fix.

We are happy to get feedback on this behavior. In those threads the discussion seemed to die once it was explained where the order came from. Workflow usability like this is important so we are always looking for ways to improve.

One possibility might be a Sort toggle button. It wouldn't sort when clicked, rather clicking turns it on/off. When on, the dopesheet bones are sorted by name. When off, the dopesheet bones are sorted by selection order. Do you think this would help your workflow? Any other ideas?

amcleod

Nate, thanks for the fast attention. You guys are really responsive to user inquiries, and I want to explicitly say that I am super impressed and really happy about that.

For my own workflow, what I'm doing can basically be described as frequently switching between several different collections of bones in the dopesheet.
I am frequently swapping between:

working with a selection group that I created manually by ctrl-clicking in the editor area
working with a selection group that I created manually by ctrl-clicking in the tree
working with a selection group that I created manually by ctrl-clicking items in the dopesheet while the dopesheet is locked (I do this a lot)
working with a pre-created selection group that I saved and loaded using the ctrl+NUM shortcuts
working with the entire animation by deselecting everything (by pressing SPACE), then locking the dopesheet

Actually checking my workflow, I am also noticing that I'm making heavy use of "Update dopesheet items to selected bones".

Looking at it now, I can see how the list is ordering items by the order they were selected... but it's only doing that consistently when the selection is made while dopesheet is unlocked. I frequently make selections while the dopesheet is locked, and then either unlock/lock, or hit the "Update dopesheet items to selected bones" button.

It appears that if a selection is built (in any manner) while the dopesheet is locked, the "arrange items in the order they were selected" rule no longer applies. When the dopesheet is updated (either by unlocking, or by hitting "refresh") the existing order in the dopesheet is preserved and unecessary items simply are removed.

I think there's also an issue where if:

a selection is built while the dopesheet is locked, and the dopesheet is updated (selection A)
a new selection is built, and the dopesheet is updated a second time (selection B)
all items are deslected and the dopesheet is unlocked
items that were excluded when creating selection B now have their positions in the dopesheet re-arranged... placed at the bottom? I'm not entirely sure what's happening here.

So yeah that's my usage-case. Gotta move on for today, but hopefully this will be helpful.
I think the biggest issue for me is just the inconsistency. I think ideally for me I'd like to have the bones listed in the order they appear in the tree, with perhaps the option to invert the list order if desired.