2025-05-13 Sculpt, Paint, & Texture Module Meeting

Meetings
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1

Check the overview thread for more information about the meeting.

Present

  • Sean Kim
  • Hans Goudey
  • Julien Kaspar

Announcements

N/A

Since the Last Meeting

  • Sean

Commits

For a full set of changes, see the main tracker. The above is a curated list of fixes and changes for the module.

Meeting Topics

  • Sculpt: Add Geometry Nodes “texture” evaluation to brushes
    • Do we want to land this in 4.5? Should we wait for this to be more “feature complete” or is this valuable in its current state?
    • Conclusion: Agreement that we want to wait until 5.0 for this to add a few more features.
  • Migrate unified paint flag from scene / mode level to brush level
    • Forward looking question (5.0) - this seems like something we generally want, but is moving it to the brush level sufficient or do we need some kind of hierarchy system for settings?
    • Conclusion: General agreement that it’s fine to start with this approach for now in 5.0. Would need further feedback before we decide to make this more complex.
  • Expose Dyntopo scene-level settings as brush settings
    • Discussion about usefulness of this feature with the current settings.
    • Julien brought up the point that the main benefits he saw for brush-level settings were other settings introduced in the old Dyntopo Refactor
    • Sean brought up that the unified paint settings listed above and a confusing UI means that this won’t be possible for 4.5.
    • Minor discussion about potential workflows that this would enable (e.g. custom brushes with individual detail sizes or choosing to only subdivide / collapse), but module did not have strong concrete examples to justify trying to rush this.
    • Conclusion: Deprioritized for now. Looking for specific workflow feedback from the community here to help inform priority.
  • Sculpting brushes shortcuts in Blender 4.3
    • Looking for context here, is the missing feature the “toggle” functionality that the old operator has? (e.g. Pressing M in 4.2 switches to the mask brush, pressing it again switches it back to the prior brush)
    • Julien brings up the cycling feature that used to exist, but no default brushes had it enabled. It was more of a power user feature
    • Hans brings up a number of ideas of how this could be implemented
    • Sean brought up idea of cycling based on asset tags, but adding extra functional meaning to these strongly conflicts with current design
    • Proposal discussed of making the cycling feature a list of asset references in the keymap editor
    • Conclusion: Change seems straight forward enough to make and it seems like a good feature to bring back for 4.5 LTS. Sean will work on this.
  • WIP: Assets: Support editing/overriding essentials assets
    • This topic came up as we were discussing the general point of last minute 4.5 targets.
    • Julien brings up that this feels important to try and get in the release.
    • Conclusion: To sync with Julian to understand current state.
  • 3D Texture Paint
    • What is the MVP for getting this out of experimental?
    • Julien has mentioned in the past that we should wait for more brushes to be done than just the standard Paint brush before moving this out of experimental.
    • Sean brings up that it feels more beneficial for users to have at least a workable single brush in Sculpt mode that works on textures in an official release given how painful the current Texture Paint mode is.
    • Hans and Sean agree that with a single brush out of experimental, it becomes easier to prioritize small incremental improvements on a per release & it becomes easier to attract new contributors instead of having this mountain of work that still needs to be done.
    • However, Julien is worried that a few releases from now we may still be in a half complete state.
    • Conclusion: Sean to draft email to Dalai to get further product feedback on this. No strong agreement currently on the path forward, but will continue discussing further.

Need Help

  • Community feedback wanted on the Dyntopo brush settings workflow question listed above.
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