2023-07-13 Texture Painting Polishing Workshop

Meetings
1

Initial meeting to define the scope of a (potential) project to improve the texture painting experience . Those are unrelated to the Layered Textures project and are expected to be of shorter scope and execution.

Proposed agenda:

  • Pain points by Simon & Julien.
  • 3D brush status update.
  • List of reported bugs (and their priorities).
  • Proposed list of targets.

Attendees:

  • Andy Goralczyk
  • Brecht Van Lommel
  • Dalai Felinto
  • Jeroen Bakker
  • Julien Kaspar
  • Sergey Sharybin
  • Simon Thommes

Notes

Currently use of texture painting in the Studio:

Texture painting (both 3d view and image editor) is almost exclusively used as low resolution masks and id maps for procedural systems. Mainly because of performance reasons and heavy use of procedural setups.

Pain points (mainly about 3D view of old image texture system)

  • Performance (Max 8k possible)
    • Geometry resolution & modifiers can lead to poor performance.
    • Also tablet lag.
  • Undo bugs (also spanning into sculpt mode).
    • Caused by design issues of undo system.
  • Also problems when syncing between image editor and 3d view (#98014)
  • Splitting ‘active image node’ and ‘active image for texture painting’
    • Main need here is an expicit action to set painting target.
    • Baking is also affected but separate topic
  • Painting specific channels, including alpha channel (not high priority but nice to have)
    • Resource and performance reasons because its one image instead of individual b/w images
    • Currently done via addons
  • 8/16 bit textures have different strength behavior (premultiplied problems)
    • There’s a bug. Needs to be checked
  • Various udim fixeds. Unclear right now what and details. Should check and collect in a task (plus more testing)
    • Udims were very important for Charge
  • Multi-object painting
    • Currently not implemented
    • Focus: Same UV space. One texture. Multiple objects.
    • Active UV map selection maybe shouldn’t be used for texture painting. The texture could refer to its prefered UV map.
  • Multi object uv editing
    • Needs context awareness of different UV maps
    • Needs way of selecting / syncing uv maps across different objects
    • Similar issue with Set Attribute in edit mode while using multi-object editing. Which attribute is active!?
  • UV bleeding issues (3D view)
    • Heavily depending on view angle if pixels are cought and bled
  • 2D mirroring based on geometry and UV (image editor)
    • Both share similar space. Supporting mirror in image editor
    • Not high priority
  • Also syncing selection between 3d view and image editor
    • Support for using selections in image editor
  • Not really went into the brush settings/system
    • Square shape
      • Could be fixed in the short term in other ways. Will discuss again later.
    • Some of Daniels notes can be or already are reported as bugs
    • Others have some design issues. Can talk about it after meeting

A lot of these are features/fixes that would also affect new painting system down the line.

The focus on these proposals is to improve the workflow on production cases (multiple uv maps, objects, udims, complex materials). Also rely on figuring out a design.

State of 3D brush

  • Vital Unsupported

    • Color sampling
    • Erase blend mode
    • Affect only visible (Show/Hide)
    • Affect Alpha option
    • Masking
    • Fill operation
      • It’s own topic. Might not be that easy.

  • Additional unsupported:

    • Sync masks and edit mode selection
    • Paint modified geometry instead of base mesh (Like with subdiv modifier enabled)
    • Image editor syncing
      • Tool settings
      • UV overlay
      • Masking
    • Blur & smear brushes
    • Clone brush
    • Various paint brush settings
    • Stencil masking

  • How vital is the 3D brush?

    • Would be useful
    • Fixing mentioned Texture paint pain points would also improvements new system
    • Working on performance on new system time better spent. Old system to be replaced anyway.
      • Performance on new system is better?
      • Progress is still relatively early. More tests and tweaks need to be made. Currently not as fast as needed.
      • Some changes also affect sculpt brushes … makes it difficult

The new texture paint system focuses on rebuilding the basic functionality of the old one but improved.
Vital unsupported features are mostly easy to add. Others are more time consuming.

This would put the focus somewhere else than what’s suggesterd above with the old texture apint system.

Follow Ups

The meeting notes will be diggested by Dalai, Sergey (maybe Julien) to try to find a target list organized in terms of priorities, size, and type (bug fix, design, …). This will then be the foundation of a proposed future project.

This will eventually be added to Polishing the Painting Experience #109820 task.

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