Recently, I’ve been spending time working on the various tools in Sculpt mode that apply different properties / operations to a mesh based on a selection gesture (e.g. Lasso Hide, Line Trim, and others). There is a long standing task here that I have been working through for general functionality.
Of particular note is the Polyline Hide tool that is now available in the daily builds of 4.2
I’m interested in hearing feedback from the community regarding these general features regarding both recent changes and potential further areas of improvement.
A few related areas that I’m aware of & have rough plans on tackling as time permits:
Missing Tools: Polyline Mask, Line Face Set, Polyline Face Set, Polyline Trim, Circle Trim
this is complicated. how to give feedback on stuff that works as expected? haha
i mean, youre doing a marvelous job. the tools that youre working on are very useful. the ones that already landed in main are working as expect. so yeah, its tough to say anything other than “keep up the good work”.
fairing will be a nice addition to the project tools, yea
depth options
angle snapping will be handy
now, that right there “Lasso Tools: Stroke stabilization” is a must. cant wait
If things are working as expected, that’s great to hear & valuable feedback! I want to be certain there aren’t any nagging issues in this area that slip past my radar.
Yes, the tools seem to be working fine… great work…
One thing I would like the Trim tools to do tho, is create new face sets automatically when you trim something… In fact, it used to do that on older versions, and was very useful… Not sure why it’s not the case anymore…
v3.6
And yes, Lasso tools with Stabilize Stroke is huge…
By the way, I think blender needs a new type of gesture tools: “Slice”… but that’s offtopic…
So, the ability for the trim tool to add the new faces to a new face set still exists, but the face sets needs to be initialized first. This doesn’t seem to be an intentional change based on my quick glance into the history of the code / release notes - would you mind submitting a ticket for this?
I tried the new polygonal version of hiding the mesh and it works well. Good job! Looking forward to the boolean/trim and mask versions!
Question, would it be possible to get a circular version for all the gesture tools? Would be quite nice to be able to create circular booleans/masks/face sets fast. Alternatively you allow for more custom shapes like stars, triangles, etc. under a single boolean/trim tool which includes a circle.
Also, it would be awesome if the lasso tools had the Stabilize Stroke feature from the brushes. The algorithm for the lasso can create very rough shapes with wobble, so being able to smooth it out with the stabilizer algorithm would be pretty sweet! Really looking forward to this project!
I’ll keep those in mind, they should be fairly simple to implement as well. I’m not personally convinced of the usefulness of implementing lots of arbitrary shapes (triangle, star, etc) at the moment though, I think that should be solved somewhat differently than the rest of the current gestures.
To me it would be nice to be able to cut from triangle to circle in the circular tool, just like the add mesh circle does.
Other than that to draw the cutting object (the box and circle only) from the normal of the face, different snapping options for the box and circle tools there, to have different bevels in the cutting object can be useful in some cases, dynamic deep, a wedge cut tool, it would be interesting to port it to the object mode too as part of the dynamic add maybe … as for the custom shapes (stars, floral moldings, industrial shapes or whatever) the best option to me would be to have something similar to the profile tool from the carver addon, brush to cut with your custom 2d shapes.
To me it would be nice to be able to cut from triangle to circle in the circular tool, just like the add mesh circle does.
I’m not sure what you mean by this, do you mean the Fill Type option when adding a circle?
Other than that to draw the cutting object (the box and circle only) from the normal of the face, different snapping options for the box and circle tools there, to have different bevels in the cutting object can be useful in some cases, dynamic deep, a wedge cut tool, it would be interesting to port it to the object mode too as part of the dynamic add maybe … as for the custom shapes (stars, floral moldings, industrial shapes or whatever) the best option to me would be to have something similar to the profile tool from the carver addon, brush to cut with your custom 2d shapes.
I’m unfamiliar with many of these features you’ve described. In the interest of keeping this thread focused and not having the discussion spiral out of hand, I would appreciate it if people put extended descriptions of related feature requests such as the Slice tool on RCS and link them here (keeping in mind that I’m focusing on a fairly narrow set of tools within Sculpt mode as a whole)
Yeah, that would be pretty sweet to have! Also, being able to rotate, scale, and possibly sheer the shape would allow for more types of cuts that go beyond just those shapes.
Also, I have a question about Line Trim. Would it be possible to make flipping the direction of the line to work by pressing just the shift button instead of F? I don’t particularly like the current shortcut, but I don’t seem to be able to get the shift key to work as a shortcut instead while drawing the line in the Keymap settings. Is it possible to fix?
I’m able to change the keymap from F to Shift in the preferences, and afterwards the tool works with the new shortcut, though it takes some extra clicks to actually assign the value.
Ok, since nobody explain the slice and it is easy:
Slice is a trim mode that cuts and preserves both sides of the object, just like if you combine intersect and difference.
In blender it is done applying the solidify modifier to the cutting object, after that you could either separate the object by loose parts or to create face sets.
It is useful for hard surface sculpting and to 3d print.
the op wanted a a rcs post, thats why no one dropped it here yet, i guess (rcs is not an easy task lol)
and a simpler explanation of a slice tool (in blender terms) would basically be the edit mode bisect tool, but working with the gestures tool in sculpt
and for ultimate power, we would need an additional “line” tool that supports curves, not just straight lines. this is very important
and just like that, a new world of hardsurface possibilities would be unlocked
I think that the ability of an interpolation of a polyline gesture stroke construction into a besier migh extend the existing functionality of a polyline tool.
Supporting some form of curve in general is a good idea, though I would need to do further evaluation to see how feasible it actually would be to implement. I suspect it would require a fair bit of code to get working.
I think I have a better understanding of the slice tool, but I think it will also be a bit further out in terms of both design and implementation as well.
