2022-7-20 Sculpt/Texture/Paint Module Meeting

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
  • Ramil Roosileht
  • Julien Kaspar

Agenda

Needs Commit

High Prio Bugs

Mostly same bugs as last week, related to color attributes and vertex paint mode.
Joe is still working on that.

New high priority bugs:

In Review

Jeroen is off this week so no updates on his patches.

In Progress

Next To Do’s

  • Joe
    • Will work on ‘In Progress’ tasks
    • Cavity and normal masking
      • Will be targeted to get finished land after 3.3 release
      • Would give more time for testing and bug fixing
    • Color attribute high prio bugs
  • Ramil
    • Gradient patch
  • Julien
    • Occupied with other studio tasks

New Tasks

Julien added so far missing Paint Mode related design tasks that needs to be discussed further.

  • :anchor: T99769 Paint Mode: Color Fill Tools

    • Current design idea of unified filling operators and toolset
    • Key idea is to rely on Mask → Fill as a workflow and make this as fast & intuitive as possible
    • The amount of color fill tools should be minimal and accessible as a result
    • Gesture tools would still be nice
      • Polyline is still missing and desperately needed
      • In general, color filling gesture tools will be optional
    • Expand should be more important for filling areas too
      • Expand needs to be come less unwieldy and less complex first
      • Performance issues also need to be solved
      • But the operator is great for filling face sets, mesh islands

  • :anchor: T99770 Sculpt Paint: Expand/Gradient Tools

    • Current design ideas on adding gradient tools
    • Could be based on Expand oeprator design
    • Discussions on expand:
      • Hard to use because of automatic inverting and no preserving of previous mask
      • We have to make a tool version, so users can configure it in detail before using it
      • Also would make it easier to add color expanding
      • Expand performance problems in multires
        • Joe has an idea to fix this
        • Incremental geodesic calculation could also solve high density meshes performance issues
        • Julien will make a task for changing he mask expand operator defaults and updating the expand/gradient tool design

  • :anchor: T99773 Sculpt Paint: Accumulative Painting/Sculpting

    • Open discussion on making a stronger implementation of Flow to replace Accumulate settings
    • Joe added a feature in sculpt-dev to solve this
    • Normal accumulate would be a buildup mode like in Kirta
    • Would switch between old and flow behaviour
    • Joe will create a patch and then we can polish the feature more

  • :anchor: T99771 “New Image” UI improvement

    • Current design notes on improving the UI of creating images
    • We should include Campbell for the design & execution
    • This would affect Blender globally after all.
    • Missing from design:
      • Option to pack image by default
      • Could be tackled as a task to pack and save images in Blender by default in general
      • This needs to become more convenient for Paint Mode
      • It’s one of the biggest points of frustration right now
      • We should talk to Brecht for the texture layer design

Other Topics

  • :anchor: T99767 Scrape brush with constant falloff creates a hole when scraping edges

  • Ctrl + RMB does a lasso selection in sculpt mode?

    • Julien will investigate this keymap issue

  • Input samples are not per brush

    • Joe would like this to be a per brush setting
    • An optional “Unified” button would use current behaviour and make behaviour more obvious

  • Pen pressure sensitivity and softness setting

    • Eventually we should add a curve for various brush settings
    • Should we include this feature short term?
      • Current UI would struggle with that
      • We should work on a design for node brushes or a more expanded UI for brush authoring

  • Brush assets prep work

    • Joe could already work on implementing brush settings refactor before implementing brush commands
    • Would be low level change that won’t affect anything yet
    • No clear short term action discussed yet
7 Likes
2

That’s great to read. I really hope this will facilitate porting the useful Sculpt Dev features that have remained stuck for a long time to the Master builds, such as the real-time mask operations (blur etc.) and the extra options in the Pose tool (like Bend).

:+1: Nice, I would also welcome input samples per brush.

I’d also love this to be addressed when possible:

A number of important features / options are hidden in submenus and can not be assigned to a keyboard shortcut or Quick Favorites, such as Front Faces Only, an essential option I activate and deactivate all the time during sculpting. It would be much appreciated if all of Sculpt Mode’s options would be assignable to a hotkey and the Quick Favorites menu.

Maybe this will be solved when the Sculpt Attribute API patch has been implemented?

Many thanks!

3

While it’s good to enable all operations and settings to be added to the quick favourites, we are currently working on replacing the very hidden “Front Faces Only” setting with auto-masking options called Auto-mask by “View Normal” and “Area Normal”:
https://developer.blender.org/D15297

That will do the same thing but with way more options, better looking results and support for any brush or tool in Sculpt Mode (And Paint Mode in the future).

3 Likes
4

Sounds good! :+1: Looking forward to it.