Palettes & Rulesets

Keep a growing library sorted without tagging anything by hand. You describe what belongs together once; every clip that arrives afterwards files itself.

The idea

A ruleset is a named condition - "name matches Walk, Run or Sprint". A palette gives that name a colour and an icon. Together they turn a flat wall of clips into something you can read at a glance, and they update themselves as the library changes.

Rulesets also double as filters in the browser: one toggle per rule, combined with AND, and invertible for "everything this rule did not catch".

Building a rule

Rules are built from conditions, grouped with AND / OR.

Fields you can test

Field	Useful for
Name	The workhorse - prefixes, suffixes, regex
Duration, FrameCount	"Anything under half a second is probably a fidget"
IsLooping, IsHumanoid, HasRootMotion	Structural properties
IsInsideFbx	Clips still living inside their source FBX
UsageCount, SceneUsageCount	What is referenced - and what is not
EventCount, AudioEventCount	Finding clips nobody wired up
Version	How many versions a clip has
LastUpdated	Recency
Character, CharacterName, BoneMatchScore	Rig-related filtering
IsFavorite	Your own marks

Operators

Equals, NotEquals, Greater, Less, GreaterOrEqual, LessOrEqual, StartsWith, Contains, Regex, and four date operators: OlderThanDays, NewerThanDays, WithinDays, NotWithinDays.

An example

"Unarmed locomotion, under two seconds":

Name        Regex          ^(Walk|Run|Idle)
AND  Name   NotEquals      *_Weapon*
AND  Duration  Less        2.0

Or the one that actually earns its keep - "everything the boss rig uses that still has no audio":

CharacterName   Contains   Boss
AND  AudioEventCount  Equals  0

Saved rules run down the left - the built-in ones like Humanoid, Looping and Inside FBX alongside your own. Add Group is what turns a flat list of conditions into real logic: groups combine with AND or OR, and each group holds its own conditions.

Built-in rules

The rules that come with the Workbench keep their name and conditions; the tag and whether the rule is on are yours to change. Two of them say where a clip is used:

• In Animator Controller - a state or blend tree in an Animator Controller plays the clip.
• Plays in a Scene - a scene reaches the clip, through an Animator Controller, a prefab or an override controller. As a filter it can narrow down to one scene.

Right-click a built-in rule for Reset to Default, which puts its tag and on/off state back to how it shipped. Reset All Default Rules does the same for every built-in rule, and the order of the list stays as you left it.

Palettes

A palette holds the visual side: colour and icon per group. Assign a palette entry to a ruleset and every matching clip is tinted and badged in the browser.

In the list on the left the icons line up at the right edge of each row. An icon that nearly every clip in a folder or model file carries is left out there, since a column of the same icon says nothing: from four clips on, when at most one clip in seven lacks it. While the list is sorted, the whole list counts as one group. The rule still filters exactly as before: to find the one clip that lacks the icon, invert the rule's filter.

Click an icon to filter the list by the rule behind it, and click it again to drop that filter. Ctrl+click adds the rule to the filters already set, or takes it back out. When several rules hand out the same icon, a menu asks which one you mean.

Palettes also cover the keyframe editor's look - key colours and shapes, muscle-group tints on the timeline. Those are Pro; see Lite & Pro.

Every state a key can be in has its own entry - default, selected, locked, pending, pending-overlapping - and the muscle-group palette tints whole bands of the dope sheet, so left arm and right leg stay apart at a glance on a rig with two hundred rows.

Quick Filter

For the question you only have once. Build an ad-hoc rule with the same condition builder, read the live result count while you assemble it, then throw it away - without spending one of your saved rules on it.

Note the two things at the bottom: the live match count updates as you build, so you know whether the filter is worth finishing before you finish it - and Save as Rule… promotes it to a permanent rule if it turns out you want it again.

Quick Filter is a Pro feature.

A typical setup

1. Create a palette with entries like Locomotion, Combat, Cinematic
2. Create a ruleset per entry - start with Name / Regex, refine later
3. Import new animations and watch them fall into place

Lite includes one custom rule on top of the built-in defaults; Pro is unlimited.