Auto select new asset variant & include sequence in it's name, or allow custom naming scheme

Unity Engine
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1

Hello!

I’ve been using the sequences package to create an animated project, and have mostly found it a really improved my workflow (once I went through the Unity Learn tutorial).

However, there is two annoyances I’ve been running into - I have a few assets that I am re-using often (major characters, and sets), and if I need to animate them I need to make a new asset variant for the sequence - so I click the three dots next to the variant dropdown in the sequence assembly window and select “create new variant”.

This is where the annoyances come in:

  • rather than automatically selecting the new variant, I still need to manually select it, otherwise it just stays on the previously selected variant or original. Would it be possible to automatically select the newly created variant?
  • it names the variants using “ASSET_NAME variant X”, which gets confusing once you have a bunch of assets, but I can’t change the asset name in this window, I need to go to the asset collection or the prefab to rename it. It would be much more useful if it defaulted to a naming scheme including the sequence name - for example “ASSET_NAME - SEQUENCE_NAME (X)”, since if I’m creating the variant within the sequence assembly window I likely need this variant specifically for this sequence. Alternatively, having a few possible variables and a way to define a default naming scheme (like what you have for defining the name of a recording) would provide a more versatile solution, but not necessary for me.

Anyhow - just a few thoughts! I wasn’t expecting these tools to provide the workflow improvements they have so far, so I’m overall pretty happy, just looking for small tweaks!

2

Hello! Thanks for the feedback!

So, I completely understand your first feature request! It makes total sense and I will log that. How would you judge the importance of it? Nice to have, Important or Critical?

For the second one, it seems that you’re also in a specific case where you use one variant per sequence. Just note that it is one way to use variants, but they could also be used to simply have animation or styling variants to test on in the same sequence. In other word, they are not specifically meant to be used as “sequence’s variant”. Some user would prefer having one different Sequence Asset for each sequences and then do variants locally to one sequence (for example).

That being said, you can still use them like you do! And I understand that having a meaningful name straight away would help. We don’t plan to solve the “customizable naming convention” problem soon as it is a bigger feature than it might seem and it might touch all unity users (and not just “film users”). But I will add your voice to it!

In the mean time, the best I could propose is that, if you know how to code and is willing to do it, we could help you figure out a script that would achieve what your describing. To be honest, I can’t even tell you right now if it would be possible with the public API as it is now, but it could be a good use case to explore. If you’re interested to try that, we can assist. And any feedback regarding our API would be welcome!