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

[Antony Riakiotakis]

>
> 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.
>

A modal operation that flips into edit mode is the definition of an ugly
hack. The paint stroke modal operation is complex enough without trying to
temporarily go to edit mode, without mentioning the many holes to program
state that such an approach might open. Also it leaves a few usability
questions such as:

* What would happen to the extra curve objects? Polluting the blend with
extra curve objects unrelated to painting is not very nice.

* How would user exit this "temporary edit mode"?

* Keymaps will be invalid because we are "sort of" in edit curve state.

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.
>


Let's not get carried away, this is not a wishlist but a discussion on how
to implement a specific set of predetermined functionality, in this case
define a curve to guide the stroke along. There are some nice ideas there
but they are related to different problems:

Vector to area is unrelated to stroke guiding and is interesting for
defining selection areas or similar (I may investigate when looking into
selection mechanisms later)

I really have no truck with Apple motion. We mostly allow reusing the same
tools in our projected and 2d painting but there are differences. I am
interested in something more code and design/architecture oriented than
theory when posting the question in this list though. That's why questions
at the end of the reports are usually directed to mentors and maintainers
of the code in this area.
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