MiikaHweb Blog -> Blender (Page 5)

It appears that many of you thought that I had finished whole "Dynamic Paint" system I've been working on.

Now I have to clarify that I only finished "Paint Effects" sub-tool that allows simple spread, shrink and dripping effects on canvas surface. (Previously it only worked on a planar surface of connected UV-wrap.)


There still is quite much to add and tweak before I'm able to release anything. Also my summer holidays ended this week, so a great deal of my time goes in studying. However, it's just minor stuff left to do, so it's possible that I'm able to release a patch this weekend. :)

I just finished coding "paint effects" system. Now it finally works over UV-seams well enough.


Here is a short animation demonstrating spread effect on a 3D surface: Mancandy Freeze.


In that video, paint output is simply being used as a stencil mask for ice textures.

I'm also thinking about renaming this system to "Dynamic Paint", because now you don't only paint with mesh but with particles and other stuff as well.

I've been quite busy with other things lately but Mesh Paint development is still going on. :)

Most of the features I have posted videos about are finished. I have also added some new stuff like ability to paint with mesh proximity (so mesh doesn't have to intersect canvas to apply paint).

One new feature is of course ability to erase paint. (Quite necessary part of any paint system ;o) In this video the wiper is a textured eraser:



Because current development speed is rather slow and still so many features are unfinished, it may take up to 2 weeks before I'm able to post a new patch. (I don't want to release buggy stuff. :))

This week I've been working on "textured painting" for my Mesh Paint tool. Basically you can use object material/texture to define paint color and strength.

This works on both solid and volumetric materials. Texturing can be used to add some randomness to paint coverage or even better: to allow painting with smoke! You could make dirt clouds that affect environment etc.

Here's a short demo of smoke domain being used as textured "Paint" object. Painting with smoke:

I've been working on some kind of effect system for Mesh Paint. Hardest part of it is to make it work along all those UV-islands mesh very likely has. Some simple effects are partly ready but they currently only work on planar mesh, so still about 3/4 of work to do.

Here are previews of two basic effects. First, spreading / expanding paint:


And dripping paint (Ya, I know it could look better. I'm working on it.):



And special thanks to everyone who donated to support my development! :)

I have updated my Blender Builds and GraphicAll build to use "Mesh Paint".

Basic usage is really simple, just set some objects as "Paint", one as "Canvas" and click bake. Hardest part is to generate UV-coordinates and load the output image sequence. -_-

That's why I made a quick step-by-step tutorial to get you started: Blender: Mesh Paint Basics.

This patch should be rather stable. (At least I haven't experienced crashes lately.) But when you encounter bugs or crashes please report them to me. And try to explain how to reproduce it. :)

UPDATE: A greatly improved version is now released. You can download a patch from my Blender Builds page.

Yet another way to use Mesh Paint: displacement maps. (Or bump maps too for that matter.)



Next I'm gonna clean up the code from useless test stuff and perhaps release a first test version. :)

For next features I'm planning to add some kind of animated "effects" like dripping and expanding.

During the last week I added mesh paint properly to Blender source (my previous implementation was just a bunch of edited modifiers :p) and added user interface elements. I think that was one of the hardest parts of this whole project. Just browsing through Blender source trying to figure out how to add new modifiers, operator buttons etc. :)

I also did some optimizations and improvements on base code and added some new features.

Particle painting is now finished:


Then I added sub steps to allow solid results even with fast moving objects:


I'm soon about to finish displacement painting as well.

My smoke patch is now in Blender trunk! Just grab a build later than SVN r30809 and try it out.

Update includes my new smoke patch and some additions by Daniel Genrich, including GUI adjustments, automatic particle system when creating a smoke flow and adaptive timesteps to ensure stable simulation while having high velocity fluid.

I just uploaded a new video demonstrating "Mesh Paint" with an animated "canvas" object (Mancandy) and multiple colored "paint" objects.