[Bf-committers] Tool Stack with Tool Painter!

[Tom M]

Hi joeedh,

excellent news, the part that was time consuming on the sculpt tool
was getting more speed when working on the mesh.  The problem was that
the mesh code (as far as I could tell), only supported full updates of
the mesh, so it had to recalculate every mesh normal on each update-
not much of a problem on a 300 face object, but on a poser mesh
(200,000 faces) it was really slow.  And if smoothing is turned on
(quadrupling the mesh density for each smoothing level)
extraordinarily slow with a dense mesh.  My solution  was copying the
visible parts of the mesh into a temporary mesh, and doing bining of
the mesh faces and verts so that only mesh and verts within the range
of the mouse fall of radius were considered, affected, and
recalculated.  Regarding the smoothing, my solution was to toggle
smoothing on/off or to a lower level while the brush was working and
turn it back on after finishing.)

The second challenging part is brush support.  If you are using the
local space coordinates to determine displacement then it is hard to
determine how the bitmap brush coordinates should transform to the
localspace coordinates.  If you are using screen coordinates, which
makes using a bitmap brush easy, then it gives really bad results when
the mesh is somewhat perpendicular to the screen, or if the mesh has
sharp, or oddly shaped features.  I've contemplated two possible
solutions, one is to use UV map coordinates, the other is to use
spherical coordinates.

LetterRip