Paint Mode: Design Discussion & Feedback

Yeah, in the same way PhotoShop has ‘3D’, its pretty rudimentary.

I didn’t know that !

I love these ideas, selection tool looks similar to lasso tool in different art softwires and the interface looks much better and user friendly.

Request: Blender doesn’t support transparency in baking, some of my textures needs transparent areas to be used for games on different programs. Would be amazing if Blender bake supports transparency.

Thank you very much.

Blender supports transparency in baking of textures. Only condition is that image format chosen for baked image supports an alpha channel.

If you try to bake to vertex colors, then you get black color for transparent parts of texture.

Super delighted to see this feature shaping up!

Unsure if it’s already being looked at/useful, but this open source addon has a working layer system for texture paint. GitHub - joshuaKnauber/layer_painter: Repository for the blender Layer Painter addon

For the smudge tool and the functionality for handpainting, Clip Studio and Photoshop are doing it great-
In PS, the smudge tool shifts pixels similar to how proportional editing a vert and dragging in edit mode works.
In CSP, or in PS if you add scattering to the default smudge brush, smudge mixes colors similar to traditional media, the results feeling like blending with your finger, a blending stump, or a dry brush.
Both smudge functionality are excellent for handpainting workflow!

For later down the line, Zbrush’s brush ui and Photoshops new brush management is definitely top tier!

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Are custom brush nodes planned, so one can create complex animated brushes?

Like using stroke age or length to affect color, or adding random jitter to texture rotation or scale? You could even directly get pen pressure from an input node, and use it to drive anything you want, not just strength and radius. The possibilities are endless!

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An update to the brush engine is sadly not in sight yet. Some small improvements are planned but no big overhaul. That would become a focus with the brush management project (asset browser integration & UI overhaul for selecting/managing brushes). When that would start is unclear.

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Here, I have no problem baking transparency to vertex colors using Combined type.
That is normal to see transparent areas black, if alpha from vertex colors node is not used in material.

So, I suppose that you baked using only Diffuse type. In that case, transparency is not baked.

Great to hear the plan for sliders being implemented for filters. While on the subject, to me the current slider implementation is visually the least appealing part of Blender (right next to the weight paint icons probably(in their defense, they’re probably as old as I am.)), so this could be a great opportunity to re-vamp them.

Not sure what others think, to me they look like an ASCII placeholder —|----|----|----|----|—. Not really fit for Blenders UI.

Would a brush engine be needed for these effects? In the short term could there be a way in geometry nodes to capture/calculate this information and write it to vertex colors or image texture? Give people the ability to make the bar bones tool/feature even though it would be a lot of work for them, some would do it if it is possible?

step 1: make the impossible, possible
step 2: make the possible, streamlined and user friendly
step 3: make common user friendly things automatic/presets

A few more design tasks have been opened for missing Paint Mode features.
If you are interested in giving your thoughts please do so here in the thread or over at blender.chat in #sculpt-paint-texture for an open discussion.
This is a good opportunity to improve these features so any feedback for these tasks are welcome.
Please don’t write comments in the design task.

The new design tasks are for:

Some of these will also be useful for Sculpt Mode.

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Would there be a way to apply the cavity mask for further editing? Let’s say I want to start with a cavity mask, except I want to erase the mask in some places, soften it in others, and later use the modified mask with mesh filters.

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To offer another perspective on this:

-Masking first would be too slow, a stroke mode is ideal.
-I use Curves in 3dcoat a lot, more often for stroking (as in: you ‘apply’ your current brush to the curve as a stroke, and the curve remains for you to re-use) than filling. Think: stitching, complex patterns etc
The combination of a curve and a brush with potentially a repeating detail is very powerful

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One quality of life improvement I would like to see in Vertex / Paint Mode is more feature rich color picker widget which is shown by W key.
I would especially love to have color palette available there, so I can pick my favorite colors without opening / navigating to N panel.


But even more options there (like brush settings) would be appreciated.

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Is there any plan to address separation between brushes and tools? Lack of thereof is what currently makes all paint modes (sculpt, texture paint, etc…) so painful to use. Currently, Blender conflates tools with brushes and makes management of both very difficult and extremely error prone.

Ideally, brush should store all the parameters which define how the physical brush tip behaves, such as:

  • Texture settings
  • Texture mask settings
  • Stroke settings
  • Falloff settings
  • Stencil and cavity masks

And other things like:

  • Blending mode
  • Color
  • Radius
  • Strength
  • Symmetry
  • etc…

should be stored within the tool.

This way, we could make brushes reusable in between the tools. If I adjust one brush, it stays the same and propagates to all the tools I use.

Right now, the paint mode is one giant kitchen sink which takes endless tinkering with brush settings per each tool.

Even more insanely, there are some things which clearly belong to preferences. For example it’s completely fubar that brush cursor display settings are a per mode, per file thing rather than part of theme settings in user preferences.

The brush management is also so wonky it’s not uncommon to completely corrupt the functionality of some of the tools, especially if you dare to touch these options:
image

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This should be possible already. But the context menu is not available in right click select because of the W shortcut conflict.

We are aware of that. This will all be addressed with the Brush Management project but there is not set date yet when that will start.

Changing the cursor color per brush is actually a feature though. It can make it very easy to see which brush you are using by just looking at how the cursor is visualised.

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There should be proper dynamic brush preview. Having to adjust outline on/off, brush preview color and opacity, again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again for
EVERY. SINGLE. FILE. AND. EVERY. SINGLE. TOOL. IN. THAT. FILE. IN. EVERY. SINGLE. PAINTING. MODE. is just insane.

You create a new blender file, and you want to start painting, but your brush preview does not look right. So there’s about 10 minutes of work ahead of you to change 10 unique UI elements:
image
Across 4 unique brush based mode:
image
For up to around 30 individual tools in those modes:

Each combination of all these is an unique permutation which has it’s own unique brush cursor settings.

And as soon as you are done with your 10-15 minutes of work, god forbid you open another blend file or create a new one, so that you have to do that work again.

There’s always a tipping point where if you give users too much of a granular customization complexity, most of the users will stick to default since adjusting that complexity is just not worth it time wise, if you have to do it more than once. And this brush cursor customization is an extreme example of it.

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Like I said that’s unfortunately a known issue.
We currently have no way of fixing this until we make brushes a type of asset. And that comes with a few more UI improvements that must be made to actually pick, load, save and ideally visualise all your brush-assets in a global brush library.

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