2023-05-09 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.
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.

Attendees

  • Julien Kaspar
  • Joe Eagar
  • Sergey Sharybin
  • Daniel Bystedt

Announcements

The module meeting will be held every two weeks from now on.

Agenda

#104613 - WIP: Sculpt: dynamic topology refactor

Planning

For the patch there are only minor things to revert (Like the cursor wires for example).
There are also still major bugs and crashes. These can be stress tested with regular builds.
Whenever a new build is availible we’ll notify artists to help out in testing.

Once all major issues are addressed, the PR can be put up for codee review.
This will stay the main priority for now for the module.
Other tasks like the planned Multires fixes and the Roll texture mapping will wait a bit further.

UI Discussion

Julien had some questions about the UI and new features.

There is a new inclusion of a “Dyntopo” toggle to disable the Dyntopo remeshing, while dyntopo is enabled.
This is a duplicate feature to the “Manual” detailing mode.
This needs to be resolved. While the Manual mode is the consistent way to go, it is less discoverable than a toggle. Needs a decision based on the features usefulness.

The “Smooth Shading” toggle can be removed and implemented in an automatic way.

“Weight by Area” more evenly distributed topology while smoothing. This needs to be tested to decide if it should be kept as an exposed toggle.

Hard Edge Mode could be split off from the PR since it’s a separate feature. The feature needs more testing and might not work correctly right now.

“Curvature Rake” rearranges topology to follow surace curvature instead of the stroke direction. Joe will prepare a demo to showcase the effect of these settings and it’s use cases.
Based on this it will be easier to decide how this should be exposed to the user.

“Ignore UVs” is to preserve UVs while using Dyntopo (which is costly on performance).
This should be renamed to “Preserve UVs” and moved to Dyntopo settings.

#104580 - VDM brush baker addon

Needs review. Should get this in for 3.6.
We’ll need to check in with Bastien on getting the addon in in the current Bcon and if there’s anything that still needs to be done.

#105298 - Sculpt/Painting Modes: Revamp Keymap

Devtalk threads are online and feedback is being collected and addressed.

Other Topics

#107016 - User defined default color for images

To solve this the image data block needs a property of a default color.

The “Render & Cycles”, “Eevee & Viewport” or even “Core” modules can be involved here.
This is not a Sculpt, Paint & Texture module task.

#106895 - Sculpt Mode: Tip Roundness on Paint brush scales texture outside of bounds

Joe was sure this bug was already fixed. He’ll try to reproduce and look into this after the meeting.=

#107652 - Disable dyntopo toggle if multires modifier in stack

Brings up question of how to communicate sculpting sub-modes in the UI.
In theory there are four:

  • Base Mesh (When modifiers or shape keys are used)
  • Volume Remeshing (Voxel Remesh)
  • Surface Remeshing (Via Dyntopo)
  • Subdivision Sculpting (On Multires levels)

These are mutually exclusive and should ideally be communicated in the UI.
We could make it more explicit in the header which one is used at the moment.

This could make it fast and intuitive to switch between or at least warn the user on the impact of switching (Losing multires modifier or mesh data)
The header could then only show relevant settings for the current sub-mode (dyntopo options, voxel remesh options, multires UI)

This can be investigated further at another point in time.

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