Some of our artists have expressed interest in a SG desktop option to launch DCCs directly into a task context, citing this feature is available in CosaVFX’s implementation of SG Desktop. I originally assumed they must be referring to SG Create, but our artists are adamant it’s SG Desktop and not a different application. I’m not aware of any feature or configuration option in Desktop to launch into a context other than project, so I’m assuming Cosa is running their own fork of Desktop. Does anybody on the forum (shout out to Cosa) have the skinny on this application and whether it offers any features that aren’t currently available in SG Create?
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I had similar thoughts in the last week!
It would be great for SG_Desktop to have a “My Tasks” tab or some other means of accessing a task context from launch.
Could multi-workfiles2 be redesigned to handle app launches if launched directly from sg_desktop I wonder.
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Hey @nico.vandenbosch and @Patrick,
Launching into a step/task context is not something that you can do with Vanilla SG Desktop, we had to add some functionality to SG Create when that was getting built so that it launched into a task/step context, thou I have heard of people forking SG Desktop and including their own module that allows browsing of tasks and then launching into that context, much like nico outlines. Hopefully one of our smart forum members has further info about the method they employed to achieve this.
-David
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Patrick, my studio hasn’t taken a deep dive into SG Create yet, but it seems that it is designed to be intrinsically task-centric and have all the DCC launch integrations as one would in SG Desktop. How the developers handled the specific challenge of automatically determining which version of the work file to launch (presumably latest/highest version?) I’m not sure. I’m also assuming this is more or less being presented as a next-gen replacement to SG Desktop, unless for some reason there’s functionality in Desktop that wasn’t ported. Still if there’s some reason a fork of Desktop was considered the preferred option by some studios, I’d love to hear how they arrived at that decision.
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We do not have this implemented at our studio, but I wanted to give you a hint on how this can be achieved without forking shotgun desktop.
A little known feature of shotgun desktop is that you can add apps to it. I remember that there was a tutorial on how to add the shotgun panel into shotgun desktop (I cannot find it anymore, maybe the shotgun team can jump in here?). For this you have to take over the site config and modify the the tk-desktop engine configuration. Just as an idea you could write a custom action to launch maya from the shotgun panel since it has a “my tasks” area. This would probably achieve what you are looking for. Definitely a fair bit of work but the easiest way I can think of.
Hope that helps. 
Cheers
Fabian
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Thanks for the tip Fabian, we’ve taken over and customized our studio config for quite some time now, so we’ve already got the custom launch behavior you described. Notably, there’s not way to accomplish being able to browse and select the task context with SG Desktop prior to launching the DCC. I suppose you could pop-up a task browser via a sgtk-multi-launchapp prelaunch hook of some sort, but from a UX perspective that seems a little awkward and disjointed.
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I totally agree that this would be a bad workflow for artists. As a side note: In our studio the artist usually launch their DCC’s directly from the right click menu in the browser, which brings them straight into their desired context. Some artists even build some custom shotgun pages to display their tasks in a kanban like style.
But of course this all depends on the preferred way of working and I totally agree that it would be nice to have task overview in shotgun desktop.
Let me know about any custom work flows you came up with. Definitely considering adding them for our studio as well.
Cheers,
Fabian
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