2024-09-10 Sculpt, Paint, & Texture Module Meeting

Meetings
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Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.

Present

  • Hans Goudey
  • Sean Kim
  • Wu Yiming
  • Julien Kaspar
  • Daniel Bystedt

Since the Last Meeting

  • N/A - Most effort outside of fixing high priority bugs in the module has been on the ongoing project.

Meeting Topics

  • Sculpt Pivot
    • There will be some time to work on this for 4.3. As a break from refactoring and an opportunity to get some smaller user-visible changes in 4.3.
  • Automasking
    • Moving cavity masking out of automasking in favor of the bake option
      • Why?
        • One of the last remaining areas for refactoring in the project, have been questioning overall usefulness as it needs to recalculate if the shape of the mesh changes & can be unintuitive & produce weird artifacts.
      • Undecided on a path forward with this, Julien uses it for paint brushes often but agrees that for deformations it’s less useful. There are workflows that benefit from the combination of automasking and normal masks.
    • Making mask from boundary / face set boundary
      • Makes sense, it would be a nice feature. But it may not be worth the time compared to working on other larger projects. Prioritization is going to depend on amount of effort needed.
  • Mask Support for Node Tools
    • Useful for more flexibility when building masks
    • What are other blocking things for node tools in sculpt mode?
      • Some form of multires and dynamic topology support.
  • Q4 Quality Project
    • A developer focused project, not really impacting users.
    • The past few months have basically been a “quality project” so maybe we won’t plan another one. Depending on others’ availability it may make more sense to slowly start focusing on other larger next steps.
    • If we were to pick one thing it would be regression testing for sculpt brushes.
  • Polishing the Painting Experience
    • Yiming will likely be working in this area soon.
    • Handling the undo bugs and UDIM bugs that have/haven’t been reported are probably good priorities.
    • Also starting to work on the new 3D brush sculpt texture painting code (i.e. figuring out if it has bugs and fixing them or looking into optimizations).
    • Image syncing between editors doesn’t work anymore. Maybe we need the concept of an active image per material, rather than just an “active node”.
      • The simple/stupid method of just selecting an image in the dropdown could be more convenient. But somehow we should support the workflow of quickly switching objects and images at the same time.
  • Possible short term fixes for Clay Strips issue
    • This needs some investigation, no current ideas that were listed panned out.
    • Geodesic distances is likely the ideal fix here, but that would not be backported to supported LTS releases due to the overall size and complexity.
14 Likes
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Is mask in node tools waiting for this before its merged? Seems pretty finished already except two minor issues I wrote in PR.
Mesh and Face Set Boundary masks can be easily doable with them, and when Online Assets are finished we can expose them in menus/asset browsers by default.

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Is mask in node tools waiting for this before its merged? Seems pretty finished already except two minor issues I wrote in PR.

@HooglyBoogly would be able to confirm the next steps on the PR, but no, it wouldn’t be blocking on those two topics. The question was more just trying to get a general idea of what else needed to be done.

Mesh and Face Set Boundary masks can be easily doable with them, and when Online Assets are finished we can expose them in menus/asset browsers by default.

There is some other value in having explicit C++ support for these, in that it gives us a easier way to debug & visualize what the automasking is doing for these modes.

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How about an ETA on attributes on some vertices blanking out when undoing in dyntopo? The development to preserve attributes had a great start, but it quickly gave way to the team dragging their feet on doing anything more than the initial work.

The current improvements are amazing as is, but getting this fixed and completing the attribute preservation code would really unlock the next generation of modeling in Blender.

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I’m unaware of the bug you’re talking about - do you mean #115399 - Undo in sculpt mode randomly deletes face sets when Dyntopo is enabled - blender - Blender Projects or something older?

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I very much would like to have that in Blender. :+1:
I hope it doesn’t require too much effort. :pray:

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I have not reported bugs much since Phabricator was phased out, but here you go.
#127574 - Dyntopo; Significant topology changes causes attribute value erasure on undo - blender - Blender Projects

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Just an update on your question about an ETA here - It’s not being currently worked on and I don’t have a good estimate for the amount of work remaining to make an informed prediction. As the work on the brush refactor wraps up and I figure out what to tackle in the near future, I’ll be able to better provide updates.

TL;DR: No news for now, though it’s on my mind as a something to figure out the priority of depending on the complexity of the remaining work

5 Likes