2022-1-20 Sculpt/Texture/Paint Module Meeting

Blender Development Meetings
#1

Participants: Campbell Barton, Dalai Felinto, Joseph Eagar, Julien Kaspar

Meeting Agenda

  • Communication
  • Review process
  • Module agenda
  • Next meetings

Communication

  • We talked about the most immediate task of publishing a blog post on what the short term plan for the module is. This blog post has the highest priority right now and must come before any more coding work.
    Based on this we can plan, discuss and review the individual targets.
    Joe already shared a draft of the blog post with the module.

Review Process

  • Recently the Multires Heal Brush has been committed (ae349eb2d505)
    This should’ve gone through a proper review. The tool is not working as intended and the toolbar icon needs more work.
    Future patches should always include artists & devs from the module to review.
    The Brush also needs more discussion on design & possible alternative approaches.
    Perhaps the multires errors the brush is meant to fix can be prevented or fixed all-together.
    The commit will be reverted for now.

  • There have been disagreements in the review of the sculpt vertex colors patch.
    This should be followed up with a discussion on blender.chat to resolve the issue fast.
    Discussions should be initiated more freely and faster in the future to not block review for too long.

  • In the future we want to use the public buildbot to share builds more often. This way artists can download these builds & test them easier.

Module Agenda

  • Joe & Julien share and get aligned with the next targets.
  • Write and publish the blog post to share the upcoming development goals
  • Create design tasks and patches in phabricator for the main targets for followup discussions & review

Next Meetings

  • For now weekly meetings, Thursday 11AM CET
    • We’ll discuss an earlier time to be more convenient for Joe & Campbell
19 Likes
24 January 2022
#2

Great to see some traction going, let’s pick up the pace on sculpt mode development guys!
Be sure to update us on any feature testing or demo files you might need.

1 Like
#3

Good to see some improvements going on in Sculpting mode. I don’t think that this is a feature request, but:

The sculpt expand operator introduced in 2.93 (for patterned masking) only has some shortcuts to access the feature. It would be great if there were some UI buttons to trigger sculpt expand as well. Blender really has a lot of shortcuts (probably more than any other software on market) which makes it difficult for users to remember them, especially if they happen to use more than one 3D/2D softwares.
In short:
Can we have a UI version (clickable buttons to access the feature) of Sculpt Expand Operator?

6 Likes
#4

Good that there will be regular meetings now.
Now, T63581, mentioned also in T93946 (the tasks still need to be merged), has a chance to get resolved.
I tried to keep this on the radar for so long that I recently lost my patience.
Everybody seemed to focus on new exciting functions before repairing functionality that many production studios rely on.
It is unfortunate that a function that worked so well and was so useful had fallen by the wayside.
Good luck with the progress.

2 Likes
#5

@USB10 That’s a good point. There will be more design discussions on that to work on making these operators more discoverable and accessible.

@illussimo We’re aware of those issues for a long time and they are high on the priority list.

2 Likes
#6

This design discussion I think all of us will gladly watch unfold.
Please make it as open as possible (not for everyone to have a say but perhaps some can give valuable input if we know which directions / UI solutions you are thinking towards)

I know I’m not telling news here but I’d like to reinforce that Sculpt and Paint brush UI is mainly confusing because of 2 opposing elements:

  • Way too many options are visible for simple use cases in the Settings
  • And in the same time way too many useful / prime features are hidden deep in the very same stacks of options.

USB10 is right but there’re way more operators than sculpt expand in dire need of visibility

Good luck and stay strong on this monstrous task :slight_smile:

1 Like