The big Blender Sculpt Mode thread (Part 1)

Yeah that is a bummer. Also the rather poor performance with rather dense meshes.

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In sculpt-dev branch, there a Lasso Project and a Box Project tool.

Contrary to Line Project tool, they don’t support masking, too.

Maybe, it could be easier to make Lasso Project support masking because it is not deleting geometry like trimming tools.

You can use same masking tools than the ones working on sculpting brushes (masks, face sets, auto-masking). There is also a mask by color tool.

Hold Ctrl while painting to use secondary color.

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Yeah, I guess the Trim tools work by internally generating an extruded mesh from the shape that’s drawn with the Trim tool, then Boolean subtracting that from your model. Taking masking into account would complicate generation of the invisible Boolean subtraction mesh.

A workaround could be to skip masking support for the Trim tools, but support hiding or Alt + B isolation of separate parts.

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Lets pray and fingers crossed because sculpt vertex color might land into master very very soon. There are a few changes left :gear: D12587 Move Sculpt Colors From Experimental (blender.org) .
I really hope it makes into 3.2 and will not be delayed until 3.3

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The review process for Sculpt Vertex Colors is coming to a close with Hans accepting now.
:gear: D12587 Move Sculpt Colors From Experimental (blender.org)

This means the patch being committed possibly this week.

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If I’m not mistaken many prefer Zbrush over Blender’s Sculpt Mode because of performance, will these improvements change that?

Edit:
Is it only Vertex Paint performance that is improved or sculpt performance as well? Lot’s of posts here so it’s hard to get a picture of the exact changes.

About time we got some substantial sculpting news. Feels like the work for Sculpt Mode in the master builds has been going at a snail’s pace since all the patches started going to the sculpt branch. So many improvements just locked away while everything else just seems to get top priority, i.e. Cycles.

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From this looks like Pablo Dobarro and Joe Eagar were working on Cycles instead porting features from sculpt-dev to master.

Meanwhile, in reality Cycles development wasn’t done at the expense of Sculpting.

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Well, I am not arguing that specifically Cycles is to blame. However, I think it is completely fair to argue that a lot of other projects have been more important to the devs than sculpting for the last year or so. I don’t fault the devs for prioritising something like Cycles, the Asset Manager, or Geometry Nodes since they have been a long time coming.

However, it is still kind of disheartening that sculpt patches that were supposed to arrive last year haven’t even got that extra push to reach master yet. I remember when it was said that the new DynTopo was close to reach master before the end of last year. Yet here we are, 4 months into 2022, and 3.2 is just about to close its doors for new features. I am honestly pretty darn bummed out by that.

It has been very noticeable that ever since the sculpting branch was established that the pressure for pushing the improvements to Sculpt Mode has been coming to an almost complete stop. Improvements that used to take weeks or a few months before getting into master now takes exponentially more time than before. Even the more low hanging fruit like the Array Brush still is not in master despite being close to finished for months. Meanwhile something like Cycles just keeps getting new features and improvements at neck breaking speeds. Not surprising considering the powerhouse developers that have been helping out BF to bring Cycles into the future of rendering, but it still doesn’t change my feelings of disappointment.

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“Sculpting Devs” was like one person then temporarily 2 people then back down to 1 person whose expertise is in completely different areas of the sculpt code from the first person. Then there are some other areas of the sculpt code that probably only 1 person each on the dev team actually knows anything about and all of those people happen to be essential to half a dozen other areas of Blender overall.

example of a likely order of priority thought process:
that small portion of the sculpt code I wrote 4 years ago < what I want to work on < what I’m good at working on < housekeeping < refactoring < performance improvements < investigating bug reports < fixing critical bugs < coordinating with the rest of the team

I don’t remember which person wrote and then rewrote the multires modifier but I’m pretty sure the other 10 things they are working on are not less important than multires. All the sculptors would love another rewrite from scratch of multires that hopefully doesn’t have that lingering bug, but a hell of a lot of coordinating with the rest of the team has to happen first otherwise that rewrite will be doomed to fail.

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4 months? Dude, don’t make me laugh!

I’m still waiting for GPU rendering on AMD in Linux. Meanwhile rest of the world can use Cycles-X since almost a year! Next example - Edit Mesh performance, which was improved to acceptable levels roughly 3 years after regression caused by 2.79 → 2.8 transition. And if you dig deeper (Fracture modifier, Manifold Extrude, UDIM baking, Light Linking, …) it will be obvious that the number of unfinished or proposed features people are waiting for and most importantly - their scope - are massive.

I’m not saying all of this to bash developers for not delivering, but to show you that every user have a list of priorities and how they differ from what other might want, and from what devs have time/resources and plan to do. My additional point is that 4 months is nothing.

You should be really happy that Joseph got the grant and is working full time on Sculpt Mode. That means features you wish for have at least a chance of being implemented.

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It’s been way more than 4 months since the supposed date for DynTopo. I said we’re 4 months into 2022, which is not the same thing as waiting 4 months. In a couple of months it will be a year since it was supposed to be added to master originally. The date for release has been moved multiple times, so when it keeps happening there is good reason to be disappointed. Either way, this is not even a contest of who has waited the longest.

All of those examples given did not get delayed multiple times after being promised to release by X amount of time or within X current year. If anyone should be disappointed because of delays, it would be the people who waited for the animation 2020 project. For understandable reasons considering what happened that year, but it still doesn’t change that people have good reasons to be disappointed after it was being hyped up since around the time of 2.80.

Sure, people have their own lists, but all of your examples are specific features for development branches that got development. People got improvements to UV mapping, a complete Cycles rewrite, Edit Mode performance improvements and more polished tools, etc. in both 3.0 and 3.1. Sculpt Mode has barely got anything during this time. I don’t have to expect everything to come at once, but Sculpt Mode didn’t get anything of note, which I have a problem with.

Again, I never said I that I have waited “4 months”.

I do not blame Joseph whatsoever for this. I have seen and followed his work for the last few months and I can say that I am very impressed and very glad that he is keeping Sculpt Mode alive. However. All of these improvements are all stuck in Sculpt Mode with Vertex Colours being the first major release in a very, very long time. The other devs have the power to get the ball rolling and I hope they can keep it rolling going forward without all these massive delays in regards to everything Sculpt Mode related.

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To note, the reason why Sculpt Vertex Colors took so long is not only because of many bugs that needed to be fixed, but also because of a fundamental change which ties in the entire concept of mesh colors to Blender’s new attribute system (which means full compatibility with Everything Nodes and other features).

The review process is about done now, which means Joseph can soon hop over to other tasks such as getting the new Dyntopo code into patch form.

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It’s probably the most exciting development in Blender for a long time. If I understand it correctly, the new vertex painting system will be the basis for texture painting in the future, so we might finally see painting layers in Blender within the foreseeable future. That and the new Retopology Mode are making me very excited for the new possibilities. :slight_smile:

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My apologies. I stand corrected.

Yeah it’s not a contest of who is waiting longer. My point was rather that some things takes time, and that there are unplanned things like Pablo’s break from Blender development. Also goes for architectural changes.

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Sculpt vertex color patch got accepted and will land in master. All i can hope for is multires support otherwise this cool new feature is just half as useful as it can be and will dissapoint a lot of people when 3.2 hits final.

Oh and the preserve vertex color option in the voxel remesh panel should be ticked by default imo.

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Question: do any of the remeshing algorithms create planar quads if the input mesh has folded/ skewed quads?

Looks like sculpt colors is out of experimental…
https://developer.blender.org/rBeae36be372a6b16ee3e76eff0485a47da4f3c230

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Yeah, We need Multires support for vertex colors. Hopefully it comes soon.

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It is only the base for now, but from quick testing it seems we now have both the optimizations for the smooth painting of dense meshes (ie. what is created when Dyntopo is used) and the ability to have an unlimited number of color channels (as they are now attributes).

The latter I have been seeking to have since the 2.5 rewrite started, it is nice to finally get it.

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