As the polygon drawing is handled using a buffer that is converted to stroke inmediately, the drawing engine was not drawing the buffer stroke because it was empty, and the stoke was not visible becaus eit was in fast drawing mode.
Now there is a special flag to indicate the polygon mode is enabled and force the drawing engine to draw strokes and disable fast drawing.
The initial design assumed that there was only one object for each unique name, but that was not the case when instances were created.
Now, instances are supported and speed has been greatly improved when repetitions are used.
As a result of this change, the option to create objects has been removed in the Instances modifier. This option was strange and was also against Blender's design rules, since a modifier should never create objects. The old functionality of the modifier can be achieved with instances.
Also, several memory leakage problems that were not previously detected have been eliminated, and especially in the grid and in the drawing process
Onion Skin is not supported in multi-user datablocks. Support this, makes incompatible with instances. We need find a solution in the long term, but now it's better keep disabled and make instances work. Anyway, the new instances makes unnecessary to use muli-user datablocks.
This memory leak was undetected during a long time, but with new memory checking is visible.
The problem was the stroke buffer batch was realocating new batches without free the memory.
This commit merge the full development done in greasepencil-object branch and include mainly the following features.
- New grease pencil object.
- New drawing engine.
- New grease pencil modes Draw/Sculpt/Edit and Weight Paint.
- New brushes for grease pencil.
- New modifiers for grease pencil.
- New shaders FX.
- New material system (replace old palettes and colors).
- Split of annotations (old grease pencil) and new grease pencil object.
- UI adapted to blender 2.8.
You can get more info here:
https://code.blender.org/2017/12/drawing-2d-animation-in-blender-2-8/https://code.blender.org/2018/07/grease-pencil-status-update/
This is the result of nearly two years of development and I want thanks firstly the other members of the grease pencil team: Daniel M. Lara, Matias Mendiola and Joshua Leung for their support, ideas and to keep working in the project all the time, without them this project had been impossible.
Also, I want thanks other Blender developers for their help, advices and to be there always to help me, and specially to Clément Foucault, Dalai Felinto, Pablo Vázquez and Campbell Barton.
