Strokes containing only a single point are now drawn so that they respect the
pressure values too. Previously, they were getting drawn at a fixed size based
on the thickness of strokes. Thanks to @kekeljevic for posting a screenshot which
made the problem here easy to identify!
(On a side note: Perhaps it's a combination of the drivers I'm using, or the
multisampling goodness at work, but after applying this change, the dots are
now appearing as round circles as originally intended, and can also be scaled
up quite a bit too. And that's for 3D points which couldn't be affected like
this earlier! I'm not sure what's going on here, but whatever it is, I like it ;)
There was a problem with the copy/paste functionality, where it would be possible to
paste 3d strokes into 2D editors, or 2D strokes into the 3D view. The problem with
that though is that these will not show up, and because there's no feedback at the
time, users may end up doing this pasting several times.
It is now possible to switch between drawing and erasing strokes when in
the modal "Continous Drawing" sessions. This makes the drawing experience
just a little more fluid, saving some unncessary steps to get out of
the editing mode to activate the intended tool.
TODO: Is there interest for tablet support for this too?
The problem here was caused by the usage of GL_POLYGON_SMOOTH (thanks Campbell
for the help tracking this down!). Apparently the issue is that this option
ends up doing some nasty accumulation with whatever is in the framebuffer for
each *tesselated* polygon (instead of the whole polygon as intended/expected).
** IMPORTANT USER NOTES **
With the removal of this option, filled areas and volumetric strokes will now
have jagged edges again. To resolve these artifacts, it is necessary to enable
Viewport Multisampling (found in the User Preferences, under the System tab),
and restart Blender to see the effects of this change.
The problem here was that when a Grease Pencil datablock is shared between
the 3D view and another one of the editors, all the strokes were getting handled
by the editing operators, even if those strokes could not be displayed/used
in that context. As a result, the coordinate conversion methods would fail,
as some of the needed data would not be set.
The fix here involves not including any offending strokes in such cases...
Since I don't have a (pressure sensitive) tablet handy, I can't really test this
out, but apparently there is a bug which currently exists with the following description:
"Small Dots, when you do just one click a single GP dot is created, it´s fine but don't recognize the pen pressure, always the maximum value of thickness, and
It´s so easy create dots accidentally (even when you use the eraser, this dots appear spontaneously) and you start to have big screen-size-constant dots beside of you fine lines."
This commit just shuffles around the order of things a bit so that some of the misfiring
events might get skipped instead.
* correct API convention: in rB071ec918f4cd gp_draw_data drew mulitple data blocks, I added gp_draw_data_all which now calles gp_draw_data multiple times (if needed). This follows our normal convention, e.g. see UI_panel_category_draw_all
* Draw scene data first, users may expect it like this
Points raised by @aligorith, thanks for this!
D937 with minor edits (whitespace only)
@aligorith, I double checked everything runs smoothly, blame me if I missed something ;). Sorry for just taking the initiative and committing without talking to you, but I wasn't able to catch you the last days. This should be fixed before the release IMHO, but I don't think it's important enough to be committed during BCon5, so sorry again, but hopefully everything is okay :)
It turns out that several important modelling addons depend on the assumption
that Grease Pencil data gets created on the active object instead of on scene
level. This commit adds a toggle for setting whether new Grease Pencil data
is created on scene or object level.
These work as follows:
* "Scene" = The behaviour originally introduced as part of the GPencil_EditStrokes
changes. New strokes are added to the scene instead of the active object, making
it easier to manage things when working with Grease Pencil in general.
* "Object" = The previous behaviour (from 2.50 to 2.72), where new strokes are added
to the active object. This is now being reintroduced to soften the transition
for addons out there which have been doing this in a lazy/lax way so far.
Now, what may be slightly confusing are the "fallback" measures in place:
* "Scene" - To ensure that loading old files goes ok without needing a version patch,
if the active object has GPencil data, that will be used in place of the scene's
own GPencil data.
* "Object" - If there was no active object at the time of creating strokes
(for instance, if you delete the active object immediately before drawing),
GPencil data gets attached to the current scene instead.
Since some tweaks may still be needed here, I've decided to bump the subversion
number so that we have a reference point when doing version patches.
Thanks to an anonymous tip (or shall we say, a tip from "Anonymous" - thank you
whoever you are :) it is now possible to render out Grease Pencil shots from
the viewport with correct colours again! This has been broken for a few releases
now, so it's great that this works again now, completing the last part of the
pipeline again.
This helps to reduce jaggies from thin lines, while also resulting in nicer
lines elsewhere.
I'm not sure if it's just me, but it seems to render slightly differently to
before for 3d strokes too (i.e. they seem a bit softer). Hopefully the
difference isn't big enough to affect/degrade the art style of any projects.
Inspired by the previous commit, I've finally found a way to fix a long standing
limitation/bug which meant that Grease Pencil strokes in the Image Editor could
not be drawn using the fancy stroke tesselation code, and were instead done using
the plain old OpenGL strokes instead.
This needed a correction factor (currently hardcoded to be 1 / 1000)
as it seems that the image editor uses 1 unit as its MAXIMUM dimension
whereas everything else uses 1 unit = 1 pixel.
For now, let's move the GPencil pies to avoid conflicts with dyntopo and other things
* DQ = Main pie (previously Ctrl-D; DD was too unpredictable)
* DW = Settings pie
I'd kept the code around in the codebase until after the merge back to master
to avoid having too many conflicts if things changed there (or in case we
needed to roll back). Now, it's safe to jettison this!
This merge-commit brings in a number of new features and workflow/UI improvements for
working with Grease Pencil. While these were originally targetted at improving
the workflow for creating 3D storyboards in Blender using the Grease Pencil,
many of these changes should also prove useful in other workflows too.
The main highlights here are:
1) It is now possible to edit Grease Pencil strokes
- Use D Tab, or toggle the "Enable Editing" toggles in the Toolbar/Properties regions
to enter "Stroke Edit Mode". In this mode, many common editing tools will
operate on Grease Pencil stroke points instead.
- Tools implemented include Select, Select All/Border/Circle/Linked/More/Less,
Grab, Rotate, Scale, Bend, Shear, To Sphere, Mirror, Duplicate, Delete.
- Proportional Editing works when using the transform tools
2) Grease Pencil stroke settings can now be animated
NOTE: Currently drivers don't work, but if time allows, this may still be
added before the release.
3) Strokes can be drawn with "filled" interiors, using a separate set of
colour/opacity settings to the ones used for the lines themselves.
This makes use of OpenGL filled polys, which has the limitation of only
being able to fill convex shapes. Some artifacts may be visible on concave
shapes (e.g. pacman's mouth will be overdrawn)
4) "Volumetric Strokes" - An alternative drawing technique for stroke drawing
has been added which draws strokes as a series of screen-aligned discs.
While this was originally a partial experimental technique at getting better
quality 3D lines, the effects possible using this technique were interesting
enough to warrant making this a dedicated feature. Best results when partial
opacity and large stroke widths are used.
5) Improved Onion Skinning Support
- Different colours can be selected for the before/after ghosts. To do so,
enable the "colour wheel" toggle beside the Onion Skinning toggle, and set
the colours accordingly.
- Different numbers of ghosts can be shown before/after the current frame
6) Grease Pencil datablocks are now attached to the scene by default instead of
the active object.
- For a long time, the object-attachment has proved to be quite problematic
for users to keep track of. Now that this is done at scene level, it is
easier for most users to use.
- An exception for old files (and for any addons which may benefit from object
attachment instead), is that if the active object has a Grease Pencil datablock,
that will be used instead.
- It is not currently possible to choose object-attachment from the UI, but
it is simple to do this from the console instead, by doing:
context.active_object.grease_pencil = bpy.data.grease_pencil["blah"]
7) Various UI Cleanups
- The layers UI has been cleaned up to use a list instead of the nested-panels
design. Apart from saving space, this is also much nicer to look at now.
- The UI code is now all defined in Python. To support this, it has been necessary
to add some new context properties to make it easier to access these settings.
e.g. "gpencil_data" for the datablock
"active_gpencil_layer" and "active_gpencil_frame" for active data,
"editable_gpencil_strokes" for the strokes that can be edited
- The "stroke placement/alignment" settings (previously "Drawing Settings" at the
bottom of the Grease Pencil panel in the Properties Region) is now located in
the toolbar. These were more toolsettings than properties for how GPencil got drawn.
- "Use Sketching Sessions" has been renamed "Continuous Drawing", as per a
suggestion for an earlier discussion on developer.blender.org
- By default, the painting operator will wait for a mouse button to be pressed
before it starts creating the stroke. This is to make it easier to include
this operator in various toolbars/menus/etc. To get it immediately starting
(as when you hold down DKEy to draw), set "wait_for_input" to False.
- GPencil Layers can be rearranged in the "Grease Pencil" mode of the Action Editor
- Toolbar panels have been added to all the other editors which support these.
8) Pie menus for quick-access to tools
A set of experimental pie menus has been included for quick access to many
tools and settings. It is not necessary to use these to get things done,
but they have been designed to help make certain common tasks easier.
- Ctrl-D = The main pie menu. Reveals tools in a context sensitive and
spatially stable manner.
- D Q = "Quick Settings" pie. This allows quick access to the active
layer's settings. Notably, colours, thickness, and turning
onion skinning on/off.
gpencil_data_duplicate() was being used for gp drawing undo buffers, where using an
exact copy is exactly what we want/need. Instead, the code here now has an additional
arg for determining whether a direct copy is warranted or not.
Make the UI API more consistent and reduce confusion with some naming.
mainly:
- API function calls
- enum values
some internal static functions have been left for now
