Present: Pablo Dobarro, Julian Kaspar, Daniel Bystedt
Sculpt Expand
- Pablo did an overview and demo of Expand. The initial impression is positive.
- Julien and Daniel will try it for the following days. Pablo will start cleaning up the code to get it ready for merge.
- We agree on merging it as soon as possible (2.93) with limited functionality and features for Multires and Dyntopo.
- Some of the UI namings of its options (Geodesic distances, Topology diagonals…) can be confusing as they refer to implementation details. We will revisit this in the patch review.
Matcaps
Matcaps were included in 2.80 using a call for content from the community. These matcaps only include a diffuse pass. In 2.81, separate specular pass support was added to matcap rendering, but none of the current matcaps was using this feature because we don’t have access to all the contributed source files. In order to solve this and continue improving matcap rendering, we decided to handle the design of the matcaps ourselves.
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Daniel created a file recreating all current matcaps so we could extract diffuse and specular as separate layers.
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We went through all current matcaps to discuss a new default set to ship with Blender, focused on functionality. We agree on the current set of matcaps to be the default:
- Gray diffuse
- Gray with high specular light
- White diffuse for painting colors
- White for painting colors with high specular
- Tinted with more saturated rim lights
- Black gradient
- Surface debugging gradient
- Surface debugging gradient fresnel
- Vertical light with specular
Other topics
- Multires Displacmenet Baking: Pablo will investigate the commit pointed by Germano in blender.chat (Fix T57517: multires displacement baking relative to smooth base mesh not working. · e7811ce0c4 - blender - Blender Projects) to see what the status of that is. No other news regarding its development.
- We agree on adding a global smooth strength factor property as part of Sculpt to control the intensity of smoothing without changing to the smooth brush. Pablo will make a patch for this soon.
- Daniel reported some bugs in the Scene Project tool related to incorrect and noisy projection. All those bugs (and some more) are now fixed in the branch. The tool should now be ready for master.
- Daniel suggested an overlay/cursor option to show the sculpt pivot when using the transform tools. Pablo will try to implement a prototype in sculpt-dev.
- Daniel suggested a way to implement lasso projection for the gesture. Pablo will try to implement a limited version of that in sculpt-dev, as the proposed behavior requires too many hacks in the code.
- Daniel suggested a tool for adding separate volumes by replicating a mesh along the stroke and then remesh all new geometry. Pablo will try to implement a prototype for this, but probably will have too many limitations and UI issues to be good enough for master
- Julien suggested a tool for sculpting and replicating shapes along curves. Pablo will make a prototype of a tube creation brush, but probably more advanced functionality related to curves should be implemented in the curve object.
- Julien suggested cleaning up the mask pie menu by creating a Mask Filter. Pablo will work on this.
- Julien showed a proposal for cleaning up the UI and show only the most used features. We agree that it needs a broader discussion with the UI team to handle these kinds of changes.
- Pablo suggested discussing the patch for cleaning up the keymap (Blender Archive - developer.blender.org). We agree on addressing only the part related to context menus and obsolete operators in that patch, without removing any brush entries. We still need to decide how to handle brushes, but that should be part of the brush management project. Pablo pointed out that brush management and switching should not be part of the general keymap.
- Pablo mentioned the technical documents he wrote last week about Multires limitations and mesh data representation design. He pointed out that before making any decisions regarding these topics, we should have a clear idea (both for sculpting and texture painting) of which techniques, workflows, and styles we want to focus on. After that, we can start making coherent technical decisions for updating the foundations of these modes for the following years. There will be further discussions about this as it is the main blocking topic for new development.
