Painting category

What I think of is a sort of a mix between painting a UV map and using the sculpt tool.
It might be less computer-intensive to have some tools in the image editor that would mimick the sculpt brushes when editing a normal map.
This would be used like "sculpt" while keeping a small number of faces.

Paint and projections across object seams to eliminate/alleviate UV tweaking... and it would just be fantastic to project decals onto your model/texture.

the sculpting tool has a number of nice ideas for interaction (scaling and intensity of the brush), usage of textures for brushes, and brush mirroring - it would be excellent if these ideas could be propagated to the rest of the painting tools.

Current texture paint only has one level of undo (same with paint for other operations), it would be useful to have unlimited undo for paint ops.

Know how with the paint tool you can paint onto an UV image or directly onto a model?

It would be great to have the ability to add decals,logos,other images. to the model in the 3dview; by dragging a square over the desired area. Then Blender applies the image onto the models UV map. according to the user's view of the model and dimensions of the square.

Aghhhhh! so hard to explain without example images.

If gimp's(or krita's??) code would be used as a library for blender's image editor, I think it could have several advantages:

-No need to maintain a big part of code, just maintain the connection to it
-Gimp is growing steadily, with some new core improvements in the upcoming version(gegl)
-Far more complex image-editing handling
layers, tools, selection,...
-better performance(i tested builds on linux, gimp is faster with painting images)

Things which are currently better in this area of blender are:
-brushes, brush settings(they are messy, but still much better than in gimp)
-blenders interface

this doesn't mean blender's paint code is bad- it's working nice, but still, i don't know anybody really doing texturing in blender.

Also, there could come the question, if it's a good idea of having such a complex tool for 2d painting implemented when blender is mostly a 3d package. But with the state in which it is now, it could be better to have nothing than a half-functioning feature.

Currently, with texture paint (both UV and 3D), large brushes or quick brush movements can draw on nearby, yet unconnected, UV islands. This is especially an annoyance when in 3D texture paint, you can accidentally paint over parts of your model that are geometrically distant from the location you are currently painting over.
I'd like an option where selected UV faces can act as a mask, allowing texture paint to only affect the image underneath those faces in the UV map.

painting textures in uv/image editor window allows u to clone image over an existing texture - really handy tool for adding details and decals, etc. BUT, the cloned image can only be moved around - u cannot scale and rotate it - this would extremely improve texture painting workflow using clone.

this is common tool in digital painting. digital painter will love it to blend the color.

Sometimes we need to use Vertex colors for other things then coloring. For example if you want to set a vertex shader (GLSL) you may wanna use the Vertex Color information to pass different values to the shaders.

For this, would be very, VERY usefull if we have an option to see each color channel (RGBA) in grayscale as an independent channel for editing/visualizing.

transparency is sometimes just as important as R.G.B. values.
I suggest the ability to paint transparency textures via vertex paint.

this new type of functionality would not only be good for the rendering/animating aspects of blender, but also for the game engine side as well.

We can paint red blue green onto vertexes easily but why stop there? Alpha paint would be awesome!

Being able to set a z-offset for procedural brush textures would be great so that you don't have to use the same brush sample when texture painting in Blender. Also, caching multiple samples with a z-offset and cycling through them each step would help to add some variation to your brush strokes.

Please Comment.

I got this idea from watching the demo videos for XSI ICE thing. ***But they don't actual do this, they did something different.

In one of their demos they had particles climb up a tree (like fire), and then die after a while (like fire), well you could do this fairly easy with weight painting, I think.

If you wanted more then 1 particle thing for 1 object, both could have there own weight paints.

Not sure if this can be done, but I didn't find anything when I searched.


- Uses -

Other uses I can think of.

Making a Flag slowly freeze, while in a snow cold land. 1 weight paint for snowy particle build up, the other for slow down of flag/ freezing.

When weight painting, Add will add vertices to a bone vertex group, but Subtract, even though an area that was previously red was painted back to blue, does not remove the verts from the group, but instead only makes their influence zero. The result of this is that strange things happen when animated because the verts are still associated with the groups, and need to be removed in edit mode. I think that both mix mode and lighten allow for a nice gradient from zero to one influence, and it would be more intuitive if Subtract actually subtracted the verts from the group, or perhaps a "Remove" brush could be created.

Armature bones support custom shapes, but bone heat weighting seems to be based on just the head and tail of each bone. As an alternative, I propose bone heat calculation based on custom bone shapes. This feature could be especially useful for facial weighting.

As an example: You could create a jaw bone, eyelid bones, tongue bone, and a series of lip bones, and give them custom shapes. Those shapes would influence the heat each bone applied in skinning, which could be more accurate than the current implementation.

Another example: A creature with a spine might have legs toward the "front" of its body, the belly side, and a spine in the back, away from the belly. Currently, if you want accurate deformation, you have to place the spine bones in the center of the torso, and add arm and leg bones down near the elbows and knees. With custom shapes, you can place the joints where you want them for animation, and use the same armature for weighting.

Currently, bone heat weighting takes every bone set to "deform" within a mesh, with a corresponding vertex group, and calculates a weight for each vertex group based on the bone with the same name.

I'd like to see multiple bones with the same name, but with different numbers (e.g. "bone.001", "bone.002") have their weights added together, and all added to the same vertex group ("bone"). That way, it will be possible to add as many bones as needed to get the weighting you want, then to delete those bones when you don't need them anymore.