Custom outliner icons

[dj-mcg]

Hey folks,

Our users have expressed an interest in specifying custom outliner icons for various nodes. Some of the icons would depend on logic or data other than prim type. For now, we are patching this behavior in, but I had thought it might be useful for other users if we added the ability to register a GetIconOverride function (or something similarly named) that UsdUIInfoHandler::treeViewIcon could call prior to falling back to the default type-based icons.

I'm not sure if providing arbitrary paths to baseIcon is something UFE/Maya would support right now, so I wanted to open up a discussion about what's possible now and what we may make available down the road. Thanks!

Dan

[santosg87]

@dj-mcg would you be able to give us a little more info on what you are trying to achieve? we have a couple of possibilities here, but we would like to understand a bit better so we can make a more educated discussion. @ppt-adsk any ideas on this?

[ppt-adsk]

Hi @dj-mcg, after further investigation by @seando-adsk (thanks!), we believe we actually can support dynamically changing base icon pixmaps, as long as a refresh of the Outliner is triggered externally. The change would need to be done here:

maya-usd/lib/mayaUsd/ufe/UsdUIInfoHandler.cpp

Line 162 in c8291ec

Ufe::UIInfoHandler::Icon UsdUIInfoHandler::treeViewIcon(const Ufe::SceneItem::Ptr& item) const

so that whatever dynamic criterion is desired would affect the Ufe::UIInfoHandler::Icon::baseIcon data member. In quick proof of concept testing, we have this working. Here is code to refresh all Outliners, again courtesy of @seando-adsk:

// Refresh all the Outliner panels
string $outPanels[] =` getPanel -type "outlinerPanel"`;
string $outPanel;
for ($outPanel in $outPanels) {
    outlinerEditor -e -rfs $outPanel;
}

If you get a proof of concept working, we can figure out how to deploy this non-invasively, so that the code in UsdUIInfoHandler.cpp can remain unchanged. Apologies for the delay in getting the right answer, hopefully this will be more helpful.

[dj-mcg]

Cool, thanks for all the info! We'll give this a shot once everyone is back from SIGGRAPH!

[jossh-h]

Hi @dj-mcg , we are also looking at applying custom icons, were you or any of your team able to get this working?

[dj-mcg]

Hey @jossh-h - We unfortunately haven't had a chance to try this yet. We have a hacked/patched solution that got us what we need for now, but I'd still like to try this approach, especially if it reduces/eliminates any merge conflicts that we occasionally encounter. Let us know if you are successful with this approach!

[jossh-h]

Sounds good @dj-mcg , will post back here if we get something working.
Cheers