[Bf-taskforce25] brush and paint settings

[Matt Ebb]

On Fri, Jul 31, 2009 at 8:49 AM, Nicholas
Bishop<nicholasbishop at gmail.com> wrote:

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

Actually that was indeed Brecht, I think :)

In my personal experience using the painting and sculpting tools in
the current state, I think I've maybe used the brush feature once or
twice. To me currently, it serves as more of a hindrance than a help,
and I think the reason for that is that there's no fast way to access
them.

If I'm painting or sculpting, I want to change tools quickly and
easily, with shortcuts or button clicks. It's much more of a freeform
workflow - change to tool A, reduce the size, change to tool B,
increase the size, etc. This is how I work in Photoshop as well, using
the shortcut keys to change tools, and the [ and ] keys to scale the
brush up and down. I rarely make use of their brush presets feature -
when I'm painting I'd much rather work free-form, than spend lots of
time setting up pre-defined brushes (since I'm probably going to want
to be tweaking the scale/strength/etc anyway). One thing in Photoshop
which is far superior to how Blender works atm though, is that each
tool remembers the brush size, opacity, etc. So you can work with a
paintbrush at a certain size, switch to eraser or smear to fix
something, then easily return back to where you left off painting just
by using the tool shortcut.

So I guess the problem with the current system is that the effects of
the lowest level of the hierarchy (the tool, size, etc) is really
what's interesting and useful to change between, not the higher level
(the brush). Perhaps a solution is to roll the two into one somehow?
So for example:
* The brush can be seen as a snapshot of the 'painting state' - i.e.
the settings you're currently working with at a given point in time
* Brush contains texture/strength/size/etc, and are easily manipulable
and save state
* Rather than having buttons/shortcuts for draw/smear/clone that
change the 'tool', perhaps those shortcuts can change the 'brush'.
Blender can then come by default with a set of preset brushes (named
like draw, smear, clone, etc), one for each tool.
* The tool is a property of the brush, but perhaps it can be presented
a bit more hidden - i.e. the workflow is for people to be changing
brushes frequently, not changing a brush's tool.
* That way, you can quickly change between brushes, that keep state of
how you were using them last, and even add shortcut keys and buttons
for your own custom brushes too.

cheers,

Matt