2022-12-20 Sculpt/Texture/Paint Module Meeting

[JulienKaspar]

Practical Info

This is a weekly video chat meeting for planning and discussion of development related to the sculpting and painting in Blender. Any contributor (developer, UI/UX designer, writer, …) working on these features in Blender is welcome to join and add proposed items to the agenda.
Write us a message in the module chat if you’re interested.

For users and other interested parties, we ask to read the meeting notes instead so that the meeting can remain focused.

• Upcoming Agenda
• Google Meet
• Time: Tuesday 6pm CET
• Next Meeting: January 3, 2022
• Module Chat

Attendees

• Julien Kaspar
• Joe Eagar
• Daniel Bystedt

Agenda

High Priority Bugs

• Regression: Clay Strips Brush plus an alpha texture produces artefacts.
  Probably simple one-line fix. Joe will take a look.

In Review

We discussed all currently in review patches again, to be clear how to proceed with some that are pending for a while.

Sculpt Mode:

• D16414 Sculpt: Stroke Texture Mapping
  Needs a shared built for artists to test. Joe created a branch as temp-sculpt-roll-mapping at Blender Builds - blender.org
  We’ll share this among artists and module members for proper testing and feedback.
• D16781 Brush: Swap Texture Slots for Sculpt Brushes.
  Jeroen will create a built for download. This should be tested asap. Review questions are at bottom of the task description.
  D16758 is a small fix that will follow after.
• D16758 Sculpt: Vertex painting color textures
• D16434 Sculpt Mode: Invert Expand behavior for masking consistency
  This and D16544 will be reviewed by Joe soon so we can include them for 3.5.
• D16544 Sculpt Mode: Improvements to operators that rely on cursor position

Texture Paint:

• D14900 PBVH Texture Paint Node Splitting
  Important patch. Joe can finalize and commit this. Jeroen only left some minor inline comments.
• D15298 Support Automasking For Texture Paint
  Joe can fix built errors for macOS and commit.
• D16811 Texture paint: sync from Node to Image Editor even if active already
  Julien will test after the holidays.

General:

• D16791 Fix T101766: Curves sculptmode: orbit around selection / view selected
  We can ask Hans if he can help out there.
• D16511 Sculpt Mode: Resolve Shift R shortcut conflicts
  Should VIEW3D_MT_angle_control be removed?
  Could ask Campbell what is common to do here.
• D16330 Sculpt: Fix crash with no active brush data-block
  Joe will leave a comment. He might have already fixed it.
• D16241 UI: Add Vertex Group and Color Attributes selector in 3D Viewport
  Waiting for Pablo to come back from holidays and make some final changes.

Current Topics

• #103341 - Mask & Face Set overlays are not per viewport - blender - Blender Projects
  Joe already made a system to support this but just needs to be exposed in the UI.
  He’ll address this soon.

• T98070 Improved Rake functionality
  Going into testing now. Still aiming for 3.5.

• T101593 Auto-Masking Popover for the Header
  Some tasks can be set as Good First Issue for others to take over.

• T103346 Dyntopo Refactor
  Questions:
  Should general tool/operator support be a focus for this task?
  Joe says Attribute API patch already did most of the hard work. So it would be easy to already add support.
  Dyntopo refactor will just add needed support for temporary attributes, which is important for some operators to run.

  Re-projection would be a separate feature. Dyntopo refactor is adding the possibility but for the actual support should be worked on for multires and vector displacement.

Manual progress

Main patch is basically done: and will be committed soon:
D16335 Sculpting & Painting: High level changes and new Sculpting Introduction page

Next are individual brush, tool and operator pages.

Joe mentioned we shouldn’t mention “vertices” specifically but talk about “Mesh”, “Geometry” or “Surfaces”, leaving it very general unless it needs to be specific.
For example, only for specific brushes like Draw Face Sets, does it mention “Faces”.

Other Topics

Good First Issues

While Joe & Jeroen are working on major features, we can document and tag smaller tasks as Good First Issue.
Examples:

• T102437 Sculpt Mode: Cavity Inverted consistency
• T102971 Gray out Scene Auto-Masking option if equivalent Brush option is used
• T102377 Auto-Masking: Propagation Steps needed as a global setting

Julien will let Thomas Dinges know to direct new developers to these tasks to help out.
We just need to add any important info to the tasks and make them straight forward to work on.

Going forward we can do the same for Dyntopo refactor & Paint Mode.

Revisit T97957: Sculpt Mode Painting

Simplify task description down to actionable info:

• Use X for color swapping and Shift X for Draw brush
• Eventually get rid of default brush shortcuts in keymap anyway
• Use D16241 UI in sculpt mode. Always visible but grayed out if viewport shading color is not Attribute
• In the popover, add a button to switch the setting. Replaces current behavior of automatically switching when using a color tool
• Color tools are not working (Ideally grayed out) if colors are not used in the viewport
• Eventual add painting support for any sculpting brushes/tools as an opt-in feature

Eventual steps after that task:

• Dyntopo support via T103346
• Basic multires support (mostly about assempling the right devs and agree on an approach)
• Smoother Voxel remesher preservation
• Improved Tools
• Color support for regular sculpting tools

Sculpt Layers discussion

More notes and ideas have been share in the module. A document is being written for use cases and ideas.
This will be important once Multires will be the focus after the Dyntopo refactor.

[grimakaka]

what about layers in vertex paint sculpt mode?