I still don’t know if i use the image editor in the wrong way or if it is some bugs, but anyway i give here some of my recent user experience, almost in direct since I’m testing some stuff while writing this.
At his moment, I’m testing Blender and its new interface, mostly blindly (without hours of doc and tuto) for the usual modeling/texturing pipeline, so i can see where the interface is working good, and where it is not to me.
I use blender occasionally since 2.8 beta, to model and texture some asset for my video game hobby.
I already used 3ds max and Photoshop as hobbyist past years, so I’m not 100% newbie to 2D/3D.
So here is a resume of all i found confusing about paint/texture/brush in Blender 2.8:
- For a new user, its not clear that textures data are only for brush use(and some modifier). It’s confusing because many textures term in documentation and interface are related to simple image and not brush/modifier texture.
So to reduce confusion;
The workspace “Texture Paint” should be renamed “Paint” or “Panting”.
The property tab “Texture” should be renamed “Brush Textures”. or “Utility Textures” to clearly highlight the Tool aspect, and make it clear that they are not image related to uv-meshes or background. - The texture tab itself is not clear of what it is. First i thought it was related only to materials. Then that it could be all the images in the blender file. Then i thought it was a way to only display all the saved brush texture (and saved is a big word). And finally i understood that tab was also used to select the active texture used for the active brush for any paint/brush mode. This really hurt me for hours. It still not clear to me what is the purpose of this tab. It was not intuitive at all that this tab was a brush texture creator AND an “active brush texture selector”. It should be only dedicated to create and manage brush textures, allowing to save them clearly and safely without this strange system of user/fake user that bring confusion on top of confusion.
Brush textures can all be selected in tools properties, so it was not clear that i can select the active texture for brush from here. After all its a texture tab, not a brush tab. - I did some painting work, then did some other work (sculpting) then come back in painting and surprise, all the images painted are now black. precedent paint work is gone. (without quitting or close scene/session)
- Color space seems wrong, the painting falloff between certain color like red and green gives dark mix.
- Gradient tool in paint brushes are a bit complex to understand, to use, and to combine with the stroke tool.
- Masks are reeaaally confusing. still can’t use them. in image editor with the mask tool they are painted white on top of your image, without clue of how to unmask it. There is a mask mode with only curve, and no way to get a clue of how to use it just by looking at it or try and errors. In the tool properties there are mask options but still no intuition on how i could use this simple thing without scrolling doc. I already opened doc but it is very light, and to me some tools like this one are flawed at the conception so reading just give me headaches. masks are hell.
- The general aspect gives an non-intuitive feeling. Like if large part of the interface wasn’t made for users who want to mostly focus on art, but for the core developers how know their tools.
That all for now. thanks for reading.