Well, it’s been some time since the last update, but this was a quite large one. I changed all the drawing code. The add-on now performs a gathering approach instead of splatting the particles onto the texture. This means, the add-on computes for each pixel of the texture which particles contribute to it and accumulates them. Sounds first like a lot more computation for nothing, but it solves the issues, that could be seen at UV boundaries.
However this doesn’t come for free. As already announced in the documentation of the add-on, I’m now making use of more advanced GPU features. This means, that older graphics cards, which blender still officially supports (OpenGL 3.3) might not work anymore with this new release of the add-on. I’m now using OpenGL 4.3 compute shaders for some parts of the painting, which should be supported on nVidia cards down to Kepler architecture (Geforce 600 series), released in 2012.
Grab the latest development build, paint and please provide feedback, so this add-on can evolve…
This time we got some new simulation features and UI changes.
It’s possible to simulate repulsion between particles. This means, that in cavities, there’s not a single infinitely thin stream of particles anymore, but they move through the cavities in a much more realistic manner. on the lest is without repulsion and on the right repulsion is turned on.
We support different brushes now. Brushes are managed in custom node trees and define the simulation sequence being run on the particles. The add-on creates 2 default brushes on the first usage in a scene.
WARNING: I don’t guarantee compatibility on the networks yet. You might loose brushes in future versions, but it already shows the flexibility of the system.
The second default brush is using the new rain emitter. This node emits particles not at the mouse/pen location, but from above the object. One can enable a wind node, that allows to blow the rain with mouse/pen movements.
Unfortunately I needed to stop support for Python 3.7 based blender versions (2.92 and before), since some features were not working correctly. Anyhow those versions didn’t get downloaded as far as I could see from GitHub, so instead of spending time on fixing this, I canceled support of it.
Feedback is always welcome and the add-on is still and will always remain free (use the Development Build):
This is great. I was impressed.
I’ve bought Substance Painer because I’m on the same page, but I can’t do any programming, but I’m sure your success will be a step towards further enhancing Blender’s future.
Thank you for your impressions.
This is so incredible. Why did development of this stopped? I’ve read the updates and seems like you’ve used C++ code too, have you thought about submitting this to Blender developers?
Thanks for the nice words. I stopped development, because there were to many hacks in the add on. Updating the textures at interactive rates involved some OpenGL trickery. Additionally Blender back then announced the move to Vulcan with the gpu module. I was expecting my hacks/workarounds to stop functioning soon. Now in retrospective, we’re still quite far away from Vulcan support and I think it would probably still work with some minor python API adaptations. But having stopped working on that add-on, I also moved to use Substance Painter, because Adobe decided to continue support of perpetual licenses through steam.
Didn’t think Physical Paint tool was even possible in Blender before today. I understand about the hacks, that’s what I felt too. I would advise you to share your ideas with developers at developer forum. I’m not expecting it in near future, but it would be amazing if this feature was included in the roadmaps, especially as they’re working on entirely new Paint Mode with new tools
