I’ve been using Blender for many years, but am brand new to Blender development. I do software development for a living and am somewhat familiar with Python and C/C++.
Sculpt mode supports drawing tablet pen pressure already and I want to add support for pen tilt and barrel rotation that is available in Wacom Intuos 4+ and newer Cintiq devices. I understand that the underlying driver code is already there in Blender (see this), so I’m hoping it’s a simple matter of hooking it up, following the way pressure is implemented. I was thinking of adding another couple of buttons for tilt and rotation everywhere the pressure button is found (brush radius, strength, autosmooth, spacing, jitter). Eventually, it would be awesome to have pen rotation control brush rotation, but I need to start small.
Is anyone familiar with this area of the code who can give me some pointers or advice, or even join forces with me?
Is this something that is already planned? Do others want this feature? Any ideas for a better UI implementation?
There’s no current plans for this, no one working on it as far as I know.
Most of the painting and sculpting code is in source/blender/editors/sculpt_paint. I would look for pressure there and see how it is integrated.
The first thing would be to list some practical examples of how you would use tilt in practice, and see how it fits into the bigger system then.
It’s not clear to me adding a tilt option in all the same places as pressure makes sense unless it’s just another way to specify pressure? I would more expect it to be something to control the rotation of a brush texture for example.
Thank you. I looked at the sculpt-mode-features branch, but there were many commit authors. How do I tell who is the main coder behind it and what’s the best way to contact him?
I know it’s been a while, but I just got a tablet and was checking out if tilt’s supported.
Just daydreaming, and I don’t know anything about how sculpting works at a technical level, but the obvious thing for tilt would be to bend the normal at which the brush operates. This would allow more three dimensional sculpting.
Should be kept in mind that a tablet is nice for a lot of things that aren’t sculpting, too. Texture painting, grease pencil come to mind.
Unfortunately, I imagine that there’s a lot of things that aren’t checked on a continuous basis, just at the time of starting a stroke. Otherwise, it would be awfully cool to link tablet input to any continuous tool property.
In the 3D world, drawing tablet is super useful for Blender . A must if you want to take full advantage of the sculpting.
Tablets are cheap these days. The XP-Pen Deco Pro digital tablet I have has programmable buttons and I can customize the behavior of the mouse, buttons, and pen in every program I use it with . it also support pen tilt & pressure function. I both sculpt and paint on my XP-Pen and I like big display .
Tilt and rotation, if it’s going to be added, should be implemented in such a way that 6DOF devices like virtual reality controllers will be able to take advantage of the functionality down the line.
Though I am not exactly an expert on these type of input with tilting etc. the only thing I can say for sure is that based on my tests in 2D painting software, the default classic brush is very boring because it is flat and offers only a limited set of capabilities.
However using custom brushes both in opacity and shapes can produce certain results in one go. As for example if you want to offer gradient shading on a cylinder you do just one sweep with the gradient brush (1 move). While with the standard flat brush start with two color tones and blend carefully and then make corrections (more than 10 movements).
Now by adapting this experience in the same way in Blender I can imagine more or less the same types of effects, mostly when it comes to applying opacity or transforming the shape of the brush head.
For sure these can be done in Blender now, but the only difference here about having dynamic control, instead of switching between a dozen of specialized brushes.
