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

[Keith Boshoff]

As one that doesn't use texture painting often myself, but has a stable of
artists that do, I can definitely agree that the current method is too
complicated and prone to human error and calls to yours truly to "Make it
not be broken anymore! Now!". From my people's perspective being able to
paint on multiple textures at once is not a huge deal, in fact none of my
guys can recall ever using it. Something that will do a lot of good though
is that whatever is decided on it should work the same way for texture
baking and there is a benefit to baking to multiple textures (one per baked
mesh).

Also, might I suggest a per object (or mesh) uv/image pair instead of doing
in a per material texture basis? How would you wrangle the different images
on a per material basis? Would you choose to paint to the specific map
type? Or would there simply be an anonymous enumeration of images and the
texture coordinate space they use?

Random thoughts, I hope it helps somehow!


On Wed, Jun 19, 2013 at 11:11 AM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com>wrote:

> 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?
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