MiikaHweb Blog -> Dynamic Paint (Page 4)

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.

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

Few weeks ago I started developing a new feature to Blender: wetmaps. Being a simulator fan myself, I have always hoped Blender had some sort of "wetmaps" to allow realistic fluid simulations.

Well, now I finally started implementing it but it turned out to be a lot more. I call it "Mesh Paint" atm.

Check out some of my first tests:

Basic wetmaps:


Other kind of mesh interaction:



This system allows you to "paint" textures with other animated objects or particles. The "canvas" can be any mesh and it can even be animated. You can also specify colors for painter objects. Result will be saved as an image sequence that can be used on canvas as texture to produce preferred effect.


However, this project is still in very early stage so there is no downloadable build or patch available anytime soon. All depends on how much time I have and if I manage to keep motivated. :)