@Secrop any new information in new year? I’ve found this topic lurking over the web to find some comfortable way to utilize PBR texture painting workflow within Blender (creating assets to UE probably).
Your project seems for me as the only excuse to use EEVEE in coming 2.8. For now I didn’t saw anything useful in it.
If you need any help in designing UI/UX, preparing stuff for Patreon or later on some decals, brushes, masks - PM me. I’m willing to help in every possible for me (non-developer) way.
I’m keeping my fingers crossed as this could be killer add-on.
The project is still going, and this Christmas i got some time to do some stuff. Most of it is just code to integrate the different parts that this is going to deal (especially connecting events from some editors, and designing the core base to make everything possible).
For this month, I’m planning to sketch how the workflow should work. I’m not planning to make a copy of Substance Painter, so I trusting my own workflow and trying to figure how would I like some tool to behave, and at the same time keep the UI logic consistent overall.
I still don’t have anything fancy to show (only huge lists of debugging events), but I’d like to make at least a small version with just some tools, for people testing and give feedbacks. This might take some time though, as my vacations are over and my time is again limited.
For the small usable version I still need to develop some critical parts:
-An OpenGL compiler that can be versatil enough for any future nodes and operators.
-Also the drawing functions for the interface (which are different from the textures gl code)
-some math involving curves projections, to be possible a curve jump from one uv island to another and still being able to bake seamlessly.
-some basic mesh analysers for AO, Curvature, Edge Smoothness, etc. (got some experimental code for some, but I believe they can be greatly improved)
-find any possible incompability with any other addon. Situation that will probably fixed by using dedicated app_template, which might not be a problem, since just one object (or just a small group of objects) will be texture at the same time.
Perhaps start small, like a prototype and get feedback from users. That way you can test parts and ideas of the addon early and gain feedback from users.
Whenever I start with a new tool or project I research for days and weeks just to see what is already out there. That way I can avoid creating things that have already been done or find weaknesses in other tools that I would improve significantly.
Any UI mockups or visual prototypes to show at this point?
Have my sketchbook full of ideas, some not very interesting, some I’d like to develop further… i’ll post some graphs here as soon as possible.
And yes, I’m still making that research and I’m aware of textools, and for example I’m writing some tools very similar to those in the original textools for max. Perhaps some code could be common to both (shipping it as a library for common import)… I’ll keep that in mind while designing the base.
thnx for this idea
but i think if the project gone be slow development then share the source and ideas and try to get help from other developers to grow fast
I’m still dealing with lots of mathematical problems to put this in to work, and not so many time to deal with them. There are some nasty flaws in most of the technics currently used (in terms of manifolds and projections), and also because some changes in the 2.8 developents are still undefined.
I’ll have a bit more free time by the end of the next month, and probably i’ll come up with some steady solution (even if with some source code changes).
Right now, things are working in my own very twisted version of blender source code (since I need some functions that current blender api doesn’t have). It’s clumsy… extremelly clumsy for now.
SP is fast with a good gpu, but with a smaller gpu it is a crawl. This sounds like a great project - have you looked at Armory Paint? They are handling image textures in a different way from main Blender, it looks really promising.
Armory is quite nice, like PS in blender… But I’m aiming for some mix between painting and node editing for texture creations… Armory lacks from texture creation (good layering organization though…), and SP is a bit too heavy for my tastes.
Needing to work with SD and SP together is something I’m trying to avoid somehow… I’d really like to have some mix of both in the same package, along with some things from Inkscape (or similars, ie. greasepencil).
I’m interested to see what you come up with, as I already know that there is a lot possible but untapped at the moment just inside blender. I thought maybe Armory might be something to look at as far as addressing the GPU for texture paint - my hope is that later we see GPU accelerated texture paint in main blender for smoother feedback.
