[Soc-2010-dev] Sculpt Brushes Status Report - 5/28/2010

[Jason Wilkins]

I focused on three areas this week:

1.) Plane brushes - These are brushes that all determine the average plane
of the vertexes under the brush and then pull or push vertexes relative to
the plane.  These include
- Flatten - pull vertexes towards the plane
- Clay - offset the plane above or below the surface then draw vertexes
towards it
- Fill - pull vertexes up towards the plane
- Scrap - pull vertexes down towards the plane
- Contrast - push vertexes away from the plane

2.) Optimization - I've used a profiler to find functions that are taking
large amounts of time and I optimize those functions (Wash, Rinse, Repeat)
- eliminated dead code
- removed unnecessary code
- simplified overly complicated code
- removed calls to calloc and memset
- created multiple versions of a function when the default does too much
work in some cases

- however, I have not done any work to improve algorithms
- I removed OpenMP for now, pending a better understanding of how to use it
effectively

- for smaller models (1 million polygons) the bottlenecks are no longer in
the sculpt code itself, but elsewhere
- for large models (6 million polygons before my machine croaks), optimizing
sculpt more would help

3.) Brush Spacing - The distance between stamps is now based on the size of
the brush instead of screen space pixels
- this improves the consistency of spacing under different perspectives and
brush sizes
- the strength of the brush is attenuated according to how much stamps
overlap

I'll be taking it easy this weekend starting Friday.  I'll be monitoring
feedback and planning my next move.

Later,
Jason Wilkins
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