[Bf-committers] Material/TexFace cleanup round 2 for texture painting

[Antony Riakiotakis]

Hi,

It's been brought up (and is true) that the current system of setting up
textures for texture painting is confusing. I think a user expects being
able to paint on a material's textures instead of some hard to access
per-polygon texface that is set by going back and forth between two other
blender editors. In my opinion this kind of ping ponging is extremely
inconvenient. For soc-2013-paint branch I would like to experiment with a
few usability changes:

* Default texture type in blender internal is image, default mapping is UV,
if a uv layer exists. (Not sure if this is easy to ascertain in the code
though). I know that people are against changing the defaults , however,
given that cycles is already using the same system and that most use cases
are images/uvs I think this change makes sense.

* Change the way texture painting image access is done. Two proposals here:
1) Use two fields: One for UV layer, one for image. User specifies both
before painting.

+ allows to paint on any image, using any uv layer
- will forgo the ability to paint on multiple images simultaneously as is
currently possible

2) Enumerate materials, and for each material, enumerate the image-using
texture slots. User selects the texture slot he wants to paint on and the
image and uv layer of the slot are used (or the active UV layer if there's
no UV layer selected in the mtex field).

+ User gets result he expects and sees it immediately on rendering
+ May be possible to use something other than uv coordinates in the future
+ Allows painting on multiple images per material

- how to properly draw in viewport may be an issue. (I could use a few
pointers here actually)


Suggestions, flames, etc?