LetterRip, the blog posts say nothing about GEGL. And I have nothing against GEGL either. If it’s better than the upcoming tiling compositor (and works mostly the same from a user perspective), great.
What I don’t like is that this project strives to recreate the primitive layer stack based workflow that we’ve used in photoshop since the early Pentium days. That workflow is fine if you only want one output. But editing textures calls for multiple outputs from a set of base images and functions. A node-based workflow would be superior in this case.
So to be absolutely clear, I don’t care about the underlying libraries and I haven’t sufficient knowledge about them to argue either way. I’m just arguing against duplicating the photoshop UI and for doing something more 3d artist-friendly and modern with nodes. For example look at an application like MaPZone and imagine if it had the Mypaint brush engine attached to it (Jason Wilkins was working on that IIRC?)
For image painting in Blender the first thing that would need to be improved more than features is the lag (delayed brush response especially to fast strokes, limited number of blits per second even with reduced stroke space), because at the moment that makes it unusuable compared to specialized programs like GIMP, MyPaint or commercial ones like Photoshop.
Photoshop is not a worthy solution, it is proprietary, only Free Open Source solutions are a valid reason to reconsider functionality.
(Photoshop is not only closed proprietary, but also not available on Linux - and not open to support other platforms then Mac/Win)
GIMP on the other hand has support (although very limited to some platforms) for every platform that matters.
For instance I can understand motivation to use GIMP as foundation and try to integrate functionality - collaborate with GIMP.
But the GIMP support on Windows isn’t as large as on Linux. (Probably because most Windows use Photoshop, despite whether if they are properly licensed or not).
But GIMP does provide the best Linux based image editing functionality and we should support Open Projects and not compete if there is no actual benefit (community gain) from doing so.
That said: GIMP is Open Source, so maybe chunks of GIMP can be used (as guideline or converted to be adapted into Blender).
I do feel this functionality is lacking in Blender, and there is no reason to open up GIMP to do some basic rotational and layer based editing.
Plus for those who do not care about this functionality, you do not have to use it
It is a very interesting initiative, I’d say let’s back this up and help to get this realized.
Does this work with the texture paint mode? So that I can draw directly on the model with the ability to use layers?
That would be really handy. I’m still use 3d coat for texture painting. Would be great if Blender gets some proper texture painting tools, like layers and better brushes. I would happily donate then
just wanted to remind everybody about the status of the project, this guy is making great progress, it seemed nobody is interested, cant wait for the project to be finished
I’ve updated the first post with the latest changes obtained with the completion of the second phase of image Layers for Blender.
This phase has already been completed a few days ago, but I have not had time to post it on the forum because I have prepared a workshop on the blender code to Viewconference.
I hope you like the work and that it is the height of Blender!!
