New brush dialog

[Boudewijn Rempt]

On Thursday 17 June 2010, LukasT.dev at gmail.com wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> I'm working on polishing spray paintop and make in more consistent with
> other paintops. The aim is to support Photoshop brush presets.

To the spray paintop? Btw, didn't the plan call for a photoshop brush engine? 
Or do you think that can just as easily be implemented in spray, or am I 
mistaken somewhere?

> Basically I added support of the brush tips from standard brush dialog to
> spray so now you can spray Auto brush, Predefinned brush and even Text :)
> And I separated Shape dynamics from the spray into one dialog.

Cool!

> The old spray supported also QPainterPath brush. It is brush defined by
> points (polygon) and filled with constant color with nicely anti-aliased
> edges. Spray supported two shapes - circle and rectangle. It is easy to
> add new shapes - just need to define some algorithm. These brushes are
> easy to scale (scale the points, not pixel mask) compared to predefined
> brushes which looks quite bad when scaled too much. This brush could be
> used for rasterizing some vector file format maybe? 

That's an interesting idea.

> Or I can image to do
> "random shape" with it easily to support something more like what alchemy
> is doing.

That's interesting as well. Though perhaps too interesting for the action plan 
:P.
> 
> Then there is pixel in spray. And it's anti-aliased version. I think they
> are usable for details and pixel work. Aliased version is sharp, giving
> rough look and anti-aliased version is for boud :) And this type of
> particle in spray also simulate spray from KolourPaint or MS Paint.
> Autobrush with 1px diameter is not pixel, even it's anti-aliased version
> looks different.
> 
> Then there is QImage brush. You load one picture in tons of format
> supported by QImage and when you have kdelibs, even more formats. The use
> case is, I made a photo of a leaf and I want to test it quickly how it
> looks when I paint with it. Yes, we have predefined brushes, but I don't
> know if supporting pure jpg, png without meta information there is the way
> to go. I don't think so.

No, I agree that the image hose is a different function from painting with a 
predefined brush, at least from the pov of a painter. (Which is what we should 
model our user interface after, not the internal structure of the code.)

> I think they all are usable and I want to support them in spray at least.

I agree.

> First what do you think about those brushes?

I'm a bit hesistant to support writing wonderful new brush effects like 
alchemy-like random vector brushes or painting with svg images. Do we have 
time for that within the action plan? There are always, of course, the 
evenings, but it's also summer... I don't want to lose any of the wonderful 
stuff we have in the spray brush now.

> I started to work on making them KisBrush-based brushes but it has
> some problems. First the UI. Should I add one Tab with all of these brushes
> to the standard dialog? Or maybe should I add More Tabs? (for every type
> of brush I describe - Polygon, Pixel, Image).

I'd say, keep the spray specific things in their own pages. Making them into 
KisBrush based brushes will likely be quite difficult concpetually.


> Other thing is also performance, but that later. I just wanted to draw a
> picture of what I'm doing right now.

Always think of the children^Wperformance!

-- 
Boudewijn Rempt | http://www.valdyas.org