Tabs on the Asset Pane

I talked with John at length about the asset pane tonight, and we arrived at the conclusion that (since the intent is for most of the asset management to be done via tags) there's not a lot of value having a tab for each asset directory. So we'll probably have two tabs or so: "All" and "In Use". "All" would be sorted by modification time, "In Use" would be sorted from most to least recently used.

Asset Folders

Each of the tabs in the asset pane corresponds to a directory in the filesystem. You may get some folders automatically created and added to the asset pane when you start a new project, but you should also be able to add additional directories of your choosing. I'm not really sure of how many different ways we should support adding them; certainly, dragging and dropping a folder onto the tab area from your graphical shell of choice should work, and there should probably be a menu option somewhere to pull up a directory chooser. I don't really know how removing a directory from the asset pane should work, though it should be reasonably hard to do accidentally.

I think all of the supported assets under an asset directory should be made available in the asset panel; I don't (yet) see a need for svn-exclusion. That probably includes assets in subdirectories of the asset directory; the enclosing path of an asset in a subdirectory under an asset directory could be mined for initial tags in addition to the filename.

It's worth noting that the asset pane is just a search and organizational aid; you can directly add assets to the current scene or sequence (from a file picker invoked from a menu, or just drag and drop directly from the graphical shell, as Mike described earlier), whether or not they are available from a folder in the asset pane. Assets are referenced directly, without respect to the asset directory they may have come from. Removing an asset directory from the pane won't remove any in-use assets from the project.