Some feedback about Krita from painters working with textures

[Dmitry Kazakov]

Hi!

As you might already know last week I was showing Krita to the painters
creating computer games for social networks and mobile devices. My primary
goal was to see what they need in their work, which is primarily creation
of textures. Here I'd like to show you the list of notes I did during this
talk:

0) Wrap-around mode. I guess this is the most desirable feature for them.

1) It might also be interesting to have "Offset Layer" functionality
implemented as a tool. That is, the user should be able to drag a layer
dynamically with the cursor, not just with typing the offset values.

2) The tiles might have non-square shape. In this case the repetition rule
should be defined as x,y offset. This can be used when a tile is actually
an isometrically rendered cube.

3) When activating mirroring either using the toolbar or in the multihand
tool, it would be really desirable to be able to see the current center of
mirroring on the canvas. During the presentation I have lost this point at
least three times ;) This center might be shown, for example, when the user
presses Shift key to change the brush size. Then it would be shown
alongside with the resizable brush outline.

4) Hatching brush:
    2.1) The distance between lines should be a bit fuzzy (at least we need
an option for this), because real-world hatching never has such perfect
spacing.
    2.2) The pressure-dependent line spacing (Separation option) works
really weirdly. I understand that it is difficult to define how the
Separation should be controlled by the pressure, but this option is not
very usable in its current state. Probably, we need some combined option
that would add crossed strokes when the pressure grows too high? See [0]
for an illustration.

5) It might be desirable if one could recalculate Adjustment Layers not
automatically, but by pressing a special "Update" button. This might help
much when one has too many filter layers/masks on a layer which recalculate
too slow.

6) Transformed clone layers. Sometimes one needs to paint, say, on all the
facets of the cube, which is drawn with perspective.This could be achieved
with a clone layer, which gets perspective-transformed automatically. I
guess this could be achieved with a transformation mask, which we have
never completed to implement. The biggest problem here, I guess, is to
adopt the UI of the Transform Tool to editing of such a mask.

The mirrored clone layer is also said to be interesting in texturing
workflow.

7) BUG: Converting a clone layer with several filter masks into a paint
layer drops all the masks and produces quite strange result.

8) Lazy brush mode [1]. This is a kind of brush stroke smoothing feature.
It allows painting a set of straight lines in arbitrary directions.


I guess, the most important points that we really need to have are 0) and
1). The point 6) is also quite interesting, although difficult to implement.

Speaking about Wrap Around mode, if we declare that it is available on an
openGL canvas only (no support in QPainter canvas), I think I will be able
to implement it in a week.



[0] - http://wstaw.org/m/2013/07/29/plasma-desktopPh2594.jpg
[1] - http://docs.pixologic.com/reference-guide/stroke/lazy-mouse/

-- 
Dmitry Kazakov
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