[Soc-2013-dev] Weekly Report #6 Paint Tools

[David Jeske]

On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:50 PM, Antony Riakiotakis <kalast at gmail.com>wrote:

>  Questions
>  ==============
> The greatest difficulty for curved strokes is the user interface itself.
> It is possible to define curves as objects already, but selecting a curve
> and pressing "stroke" or something similar, feels somewhat alien to a paint
> system. I was contemplating a modal operation that let the user define the
> curve during the stroke and possibly store it as a datablock internally for
> future use. A way to select older datablocks would be nice here too. It is
> still awkward though. Any opinions on this are welcome. I am going to ask
> on blenderartists too.
>

I think a modal operation to flip-into-edit-mode and draw a line/poly or
curve/poly-curve would be quite nice for 3d as well. Typically I add a
curve, go into edit mode, delete the second point, move the first, set the
single-vertex-splines to automatic or vector, then use (E)xtrude to get
behavior which resembles drawing out a poly line. A gestural-way to close
the poly might be nice too, rather than having to hunt for toggle-cyclic.

I don't know what the paint-tools end-point goal here is, but where you are
headed suggests you should look at two existing tools for ideas.

1) Pixelmator (for mac) - it's a hybrid paint/vector tool that's quite
nice. It's effectively layers-of-vector-shapes, where a pixel region is a
vector shape. The ability to create and adjust vector shapes at any time
makes it much easier to use for certain tasks than strictly pixel-based
tools. Layers can be merged/flattened into pixels to perform pixel-oriented
operations.

2) Apple Motion - has a pretty crafty way of re-using the 3d-canvas in an
"orthographically locked 2d view". This allows it to reuse 3d drawing model
and tools for 2d, and flip it into 3d at any time on the same data. In
theory something like this could be done for UV-Paint, allowing you to use
layers, multiple objects, etc, by creating a separate "paint-scene" when
you want to edit a UV-object with layers.
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