[Bf-committers] Making blender faster

[Tom Musgrove]

I've been thinking about methods to make blender faster and capable of doing 
projection paint on large skins (ie 4000x4000 pixels) and working with large 
meshes (ie greater than 1 million verts and faces).

For painting, what needs to be done is that you don't actually project the 
paint onto the object until you finish a brush stroke (or if you have 
threading, then when you have free processor time).

What you are doing is, you convert the current screen view into an image.  
and project the brush to be the view image size.  Then, you you only paint 
the image with the brush scaled to the appropriate size, while recording the 
stroke path of the brush.

The pixels drawn by the stroke are buffered and the accumulated pixel 
changes are done (most of the pixels will have changed colors a number of 
times in a single stroke or series of strokes).  Then, you project the 
cumulative pixel color change onto the image.

Also you can use partitioning to only work on a small portion of the image 
which could also give a significant speed boost.

This should allow us to have 'realtime' projection painting on extremely 
complex objects with large image maps.

LetterRip