2022-7-13 Sculpt/Texture/Paint Module Meeting

Blender Development Meetings
#1

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.

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

Attendees

  • Joe Eagar
  • Julien Kaspar
  • Ramil Roosileht

Agenda

Needs Commit

High Prio Bugs

Color attribute bugs

Joe is still working on these issues.

These patches will handle most of the issues:

Other

In Review

In Progress

  • :anchor: T96225 PBVH image texture painting implementation
    Seam bleeding is now in review. No new updates otherwise.

  • :anchor: T98383 Sculpt Mode Cavity Masking
    :gear: D14272 Port SculptVertRef refactor to master will help with the performance issues. Brecht still needs to update his review.
    Joe will look further into Filter support.

    We then further discussed how to expose inverted cavity for this patch.
    One approach is to expose it as 3 options that are mutually exclusive to the user:

    • Disabled
    • Enabled
    • Enabled Inverted

    This would be the most convenient and should be the way to interact with cavity auto masking via the pie menu.
    The proposal is to still show the “Invert Cavity” toggle as a sub-setting of the cavity automasking toggle in the options panel.
    But in the pie menu they would be exposed as equal options “Cavity” and “Inverted Cavity”.
    Choosing Cavity will enable the cavity auto masking and disable inverted cavity.
    Choosing Inverted Cavity will enable cavity auto masking and enable inverted cavity.
    Only one of the two can be enabled (highlighted) at once in the pie menu.
    Choosing any of them them again will disable both.
    This would be an unusual solution but potentially the best for the user.

    It was also proposed to use nested pie menus. This is not supported by the current design though.

    We also discussed the operator to create a cavity mask. As of right now this is implemented as a new tab to bake the current auto masks. That is not ideal. We need to make these distinct operators.
    For cavity masks we can make a replacement for the “Dirty Mask” operator in the mask menu simply called “Cavity Mask”. The same could then be done for a “Normal Mask” operator.
    These operators would then use the auto mask settings by default when used, but the result can be tweaked further with adjust last operation settings.

  • :anchor: T98593 Paint Mode: Backface Occlusion
    Joe mentioned that area normal auto masking wouldn’t be supported by filters anyway. So only view normal auto masking could get support.
    Sculpting tools support seems to be fixed.
    The Occlusion feature still missing.

Next To Do’s

  • Joe
    • High prio bugs
    • Automasking modes
  • Jeroen
    • On holiday next week
  • Julien
    • Test patches
    • Design tasks

New Tasks

  • :anchor: T99607 Resolve “Shift R” shortcut conflict
    This should be prioritised since the hair curves project is mimicking shortcut conflicts in sculpt mode. This is causing the shortcut conflict to spread.
    Alt R was the first proposal but is not convenient to press when pressing Ctrl R just before.
    Ctrl Shift R is a better solution but is making common shortcut too complex.
    Another solution could be a new shortcut for Repeat Last?
    But only Ctrl Alt R would be available and Repeat Last is used a lot to be made more inconvenient.
    We need to investigate this further.

  • :anchor: T99609 Use Scene Spacing Distance by default
    A possible improvement to investigate further. Julien will test the behaviour to try to find more issues. Joe wants to look into one fix: Increase the minimum allowed spacing of stroke points with scene spacing. This could already improve performance.

  • :anchor: T99614 Sculpt Mode: Color Picker Gradient
    We should prioritise polishing the sculpt mode painting features for the upcoming release.
    Joe suspects this might be easy to include. He’ll investigate.

  • :anchor: T99615 Sculpt Paint: Smoothing Strength
    Pressing issue only due to missing Painting Brush smoothing strength control.
    There are further issues that would be good to discuss and add to the design:

    • Shift smoothing is copying all brush settings from current smooth brush called “Smooth”
    • If Smooth brush is set to surface smoothing or enhancing details, this affects Shfit smoothing
    • Shift smoothing will in some cases take stroke settings from currently active brush

    Sculpt-Dev uses a single global slider for smoothing strength .We should try to to implement this for mesh, color and mask smoothing, with a shortcut on Alt F.
    With further brush engine refactors in the future we can include settings to override the global smoothing strength on each brush. But that would be long term.

Other Topics

  • Updated :anchor: T97957 Sculpt Mode Painting shortcut design
    D is off limits because of annotate.
    We should compare X for color swap shortcut with other software. It seams like an industry standard, so changing it might not be great.
    We also considered to change Draw brush shortcut to V.
    Another big project would be to follow other painting and drawing modes, and don’t include any brush shortcuts by default. This would be a bigger topic to discuss.
    The advantages would be that users are free to assign shortcuts to brushes they actually use. Different workflows will require different brushes and many users customise brush shortcuts early on.
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18 July 2022