[Bf-taskforce25] brush and paint settings

[Nicholas Bishop]

Here are my thoughts:

> * Where is the tool (draw/soften/.., comb/cut/.., etc) best stored? Is
> that in the brush itself, or outside of the brush? In other words, if
> you select a brush datablock, should that also set the tool?

I believe it should be part of the brush. I would like see brushes
evolving towards a highly-tweakable preset-based system. With sculpt,
for example, the low-level tools (draw, smooth, etc.) can really do a
wide range of effects depending on the many settings, so we're going
to need a little library of brushes (more like how ZBrush does it, I
think.) Since the effects of the brush settings are tied to the
low-level tool, I want the tool setting to stay inside the brush. This
way, the user can switch between brushes in one step, rather than two
steps (selecting a brush, then re-selecting the sculpt tool they
really wanted to use with it.)

> * In case it is outside of the brush, do you want the brush to be shared
> between all tools, or should each tool have its own brush?

Answered above, but on a related note, rather than having a brush for
each tool, a thing I plan to do for sculpt mode is some way to have a
secondary brush. The secondary brush can be switched to by e.g.
holding down shift either before or during the brush stroke. Probably
a good default secondary brush would be some sort of smoothing brush.

> * Should all paint modes share the same brush datablock? Vertex/texture
> paint and sculpt datablocks I can imagine being useful to share by
> default. For weight painting and particle mode it is perhaps less
> useful, so should those two get a new brush datablock?

This I have less of an opinion on. Only thing I see clearly is that
for the true paint modes (vertex, texture) and sculpt, we need to do
better with making sure the same brush features are available across
all modes (to the extent it makes sense, anyway.) Probably also
there's a lot more room for code sharing. Using common brushes is a
good first step, I think making the stroke code work similarly across
the paint modes make sense too.


Maybe Broken has some thoughts on this? I think he first added the new
Brush type.

-Nicholas