[Bf-committers] Layer Painting for GSOC

[Charles Saternos]

Hey All,

My name is Charles, and I'm interested in contributing to Blender for GSOC.
Specifically, I'm interested in the multi-layer image painting project.
I've been a big Blender user for years and love all the cool features added
throughout Blender's development and during GSOC. It's great to see how far
texture painting has come in the last few years, I can see the immediate
benefits of layer painting if this feature were added.

I've already written a first draft of my proposal, but I'd like to add more
details and get some Blender developer's feedback.

Some work on image layers has already been done in this branch (though it's
still very experimental): https://github.com/diekev/blender/tree/image_
layers
  * It implements multiple layers per image (across all images), blend
modes, flattening, opacity and ORA format loading/saving. Really the only
major thing it's missing right now is stability.

My proposal would then cover:
* Fix the bugs in branch
* Add some other common features that aren't there yet like
   * Undo
   * Layer masking
   * Layer grouping(?)
   * Other image formats

I'm going to take a bit of time to investigate the branch further, but in
the meantime, I was wondering if anyone had thoughts or suggestions on this
proposal. Does it seem like a decent enough chunk of work for GSOC? If not,
are there any other important features that need to be added to texture
painting? I'd be happy to come up with more if there aren't any major
features/issues right now.

To give a bit of info on my background and abilities, I write a lot of low
level C/C++ code for fun (compilers, debuggers, toy operating systems, 3D
games with OpenGL), so I have a strong understand of computer architecture
and how to write clean, efficient code. I've also worked in corporate
environments and contributed to open source projects in the past, so I
understand the software development cycle/how to integrate my code into
another project/how to work independently on a contribution while still
keeping everyone up to date on what's happening.

Thanks and let me know what you think :)
Charles Saternos