[Bf-animsys] Grease Pencil v2 - Workflow Comments

Joshua Leung aligorith at gmail.com
Fri Aug 5 17:28:29 CEST 2016


Hi all,

Now that we've got the basic functionality in master, we have time now to
make some small tweaks to polish up the workflow a bit, and tidy up some
loose ends.

I've been having a bit of a play around with GP v2, and have noticed a few
things which are a bit problematic as they stand currently. I'd be
interested in hearing if there are any major issues with the ideas posed,
and/or whether you've got any better ideas we might try instead :)

Regards,
Joshua

----------------------------------------------

1) It would be really nice to have a way to switch colours while in the
middle of a drawing session. Currently, it gets to be quite a pain that
you've done a bit of drawing, and then suddenly find that you need a
different colour, but have to exit the mode, select the color, and find a
way back in again.

I'm thinking a hotkey like "C", which brings up a pie-menu like thing would
be really cool, but we may have to settle with just making it cycle through
the colours.


2) Is it just me, or would it be really cool if we could do a "pressure =
lightness/darkness" thing :)  In particular, it's just really wanting to be
able to have > 90% pressure go towards a slightly darker shade of the base
colour instead of just making out at 100% of a light color...

However, maybe this is more of a pipe dream that we will save this for
later when we do some slightly fancier stroke rendering (e.g. GLSL shaders
where we tesselate the strokes ourselves, and can then do things like
having thick strokes, with textures - e.g. gradients/fading/grain patterns
- and even interacting with scene lighting), which is needed for 2.8
anyway.


3) There were many times where it felt like we could really do with just
being able to press one or two keys, and have it enter "Draw" mode (with
continuous drawing enabled).

Following on from the more general theme of "Annotation" workflows vs "3D
Art" workflows, I'd like to propose that we try setting things up so that:
  - In Edit Strokes Mode, simply pressing DKEY or Ctrl-DKEY will start a
drawing session. It won't start drawing a stroke immediately, but will
instead wait for the user to start drawing.
  - Outside of Edit Strokes Mode, the old Hold_D + LMB-drag mappings will
still continue to apply.

The rationale for this setup is that in Edit Strokes mode, you're more
likely to be doing quite a lot of intensive drawing, so you want to be able
to get into drawing mode quickly. While, outside of editmode, you want to
be able to quickly draw one or two lines, and not suddenly get stuck in a
mode.

(One thing I do have to note here is that my previous attempts to have a
mixture of both DKEY and Held-D-LMB working didn't really work out that
well. It turns out that as soon as you commit to have a single-keypress in
some context, that you don't try to keep held-key doing a
related-but-dissimilar thing in the same context.


4) In general, it feels like there are too many buttons/settings that end
up getting shown most of the time, but most of those buttons aren't things
that you'd really be fiddling with all that often. This applies in
particular to all the brush and color settings.

So, yes I agree that there comes a time and place when you need to be able
to edit those things - to move them around, rename them, add/remove custom
ones, lock/filter/etc. BUT, there are a few (IMO rather important/vital)
operations which are now a whole lot harder because of all the clutter (and
the clumisness of the UI toolkit). These are:
  A) Quickly changing the active colour
  B) Quickly changing the active brush
  C) Quickly changing the thickness of the active brush

Everything else is secondary. Editing, renaming, organising, selecting. All
of that happens at some point, but it's not what you really want when
concentrating on what you're drawing and trying to find the right colour to
patch into the drawing with the right thickness.

The main reason I bring this up is that when playing around with this, I
was frequently fighting with 2 problems:
  - When trying to quickly change brush or color (and particularly color),
the UI was frequently getting in the way by thinking that I wanted to
rename things in the list instead of using them. So, that made quickly
changing things quite challenging.
  - The thickness value doesn't stand out quite as much anymore, making it
a lot harder to find and set in a pinch for drawing new strokes.

A proposal:
Thinking about this problem a bit, I think what I'm really saying is that
we just need a panel that's visible with the first/main tools panel (maybe
it's even part of that?) which contains 3 properties:
   1) Active Brush  -> Clicking on this brings up a list/menu of the
brushes to choose from
   2) Thickness
   3) Active Color -> Clicking on this brings up a list/menu of the colours
available in the current palette to choose from. (If no palette, it should
just show the "Default Color" for strokes.
    3.1)  Basically, we'd want to show the stroke/fill color pair here, but
make it so that clicking on them doesn't spawn a color picker popup (i.e.
we're choosing from the existing colors instead of changing one that's
being used).  OR,
    3.2)  Make it so that we show the two-color swatches (and keep them
editable), but beside them, we have a button to switch colors (including
adding a new color entry from that menu)

The brush, brush curve, and colors panels would all then be collapsed by
default. They're still available, but "not necessary" to interact with
unless you need to start doing some more advanced editing.


5) Selection Alpha - Not really an issue, but just wanted to mention that
this is really nice :)
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