Brush spacing / rotate / scale

[Cyrille Berger]

On Tuesday 13 November 2007, Valerie VK wrote:
> On brush editing:
>
> Actually... is on-canvas brush editing and/or hands-on brush
> manipulation in the editor feasible?
Everything is feasible given time :)

> If it's not, please stop me before I get too many weird ideas.
Weird ideas are a source of inspiration for the developers when they want to 
work on something ;) That doesn't mean all ideas will ever get implemented. 
Btw, our ideas brains storming usually end up on our wiki 
(http://wiki.koffice.org/index.php?title=Krita ), do you have any problem if 
we put your mockup there ? The license is 
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ .

> Two things basically:
>
> 1. On-canvas brush re-sizing (with mouse) + others.
>
> I remember in Painter Classic, you could hold down the Shift key
> (I think), then the brush outline appears and you can drag left
> and right to dynamically resize it.
>
> Since Krita has line tool, it doesn't need to take up the Shift
> key for straight lines like with Gimp. So how about assigning it
> to this? It is "smoother" in terms of resizing than pressing a
> key several times.
>
> Features like rotation, skew, spacing, opacity etc could then
> be user-assigned to other "keys + dragging," or to the mouse wheel.
> I know I'd assign a key to opacity (for parameters such as these,
> a number appearing next to the brush during change would be handy).

And why not rotate and skew directly the brush outline ? It could be done in a 
similar way than "shape" manipulation in koffice2 (see below for an 
explanation).

Spacing and opacity could then be manipulated using the wheel.

> 2. Hands-on brush editing
>
> Here:
>
> http://img228.imageshack.us/img228/970/interfacefz6.png
>
> It's incomplete, I haven't added many of the other things around
> it such as means to access brush types. It's ugly too. :) I also
> forgot the value box for the zoom option. Obviously, there should
> be one.
>
> Still, the general idea is that within the brush editor, the brush
> is treated like an object (vector?) with a box around it so you can
> modify it in real time. The question is what interface is best (see
> comments on picture).
Well the "toggle between modes" should follow the manipulation of shapes, that 
means "handlers for everything".

> Basically, when drawing art, very precise numerical entries are
> rarely needed.
Yes that's true, you are more concerned with the shape, that's also why I 
wondered if defining a size in the brush is trully needed. Or if it could be 
defined by the tool/paintop when the artist starts using the brush.

> Oh by the way, the "General" ("Global"? "Master"?) setting solves
> the problem of which parameters are conserved across brushes. Yay!

Not really, because with 1 you are still altering some other settings outside 
the brush.

-- 
Cyrille Berger