[Bf-committers] Fake User for Brushes

[Doug Ollivier]

This is a related but not identical note:

I've been teaching Blender a lot here in New Zealand, it's really picked 
up in recent month.  80 or so students over the last few months.

Teaching Blender 2.5 takes about 66% of the time of teaching 2.49 which 
is absolutely amazing. However, I still find it interesting to observe 
students to see what goes wrong when they are left to their own devices.

Clicking the Brush button in the top of the textures panel seems to be 
one of those things that goes wrong for about 10-20% of students.

 From a User Interface perspective, a brush is already selectable in the 
tool shelf of the 4 paint modes and will change the contents of the 
texture panel, so having this button duplicated in the texture panel in 
the editmode or object mode context seems to add a layer of confusion to 
the Blender process of being in a Context > making a selection > and  
seeing related options in Buttons Panel.

It would be interesting to observe a professional workflow to see if 
people set up brush textures in any mode other than one of the four 
paint modes?  if not then I'd suggest the button could be removed. 
Project Orange, Apricot, Peach, Durian and Persimmon project members 
might be the best for a comment.

I'd also suggest that the outliner could add a new top level grouping 
including a list of brushes, as they seem to be an indipendant entity 
attached to the file as a whole rather than a specific object. This may 
solve the cleaning up of brushes as it would allow instant selection and 
deletion.

Doug Ollivier


On 22/07/2010 2:58 p.m., Campbell Barton wrote:
> Brushes could work like text datablocks or scenes, the user count isnt
> really used and you can manually delete...
> or they could work like actions where a fake user is added by default.
> adding access to the fake user setting should be trivial.
>
> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 4:48 PM, Daniel Salazar - 3Developer.com
> <zanqdo at gmail.com>  wrote:
>    
>> I suggest you take a look at Blender 2.4X databrowser (Shift F4), it had a
>> way to manage fake users (f). In 2.5 you have to use the outliner in
>> databrowse mode bu its not as easy/fast
>>
>> Daniel Salazar
>> www.3developer.com
>>
>>
>> On Wed, Jul 21, 2010 at 4:59 PM, Jason Wilkins<jason.a.wilkins at gmail.com>wrote:
>>
>>      
>>> Brushes all have an extra reference count that keeps them from getting
>>> deleted even when there is no paint mode that references one of them.  So
>>> it
>>> is possible to unlink a brush from every paint mode and it will still be
>>> saved in the .blend.  This apparently isn't a problem and is the purpose of
>>> the fake user, however there is no interface that will allow a user to
>>> permanently delete this brush or relink it into a paint mode again.  The
>>> result is that if a user creates and deletes lots of brushes they will
>>> cruft
>>> up the his saved files needlessly.  When I was editing startup.blend I
>>> created/deleted several brushes while creating a new set.  I noticed this
>>> problem and used the debugger to skip saving any brushes that were not in
>>> use by any of the paint modes.
>>>
>>> I'm assuming that the fake user acts as some sort of recycle bin so that
>>> deleted objects can be retrieved so I think the main problem here is the
>>> inability to recover brushes that have been unlinked.  In fact, there is no
>>> way to even, for example, link a brush used in texture paint into vertex
>>> paint or something like that.  (I may be wrong, before I changed it, the
>>> same Draw brush was linked into 3 different paint modes, but as far as I
>>> can
>>> tell I do not know how that was done).
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>>>
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