Brush creation workgroup

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Summary

Currently creating evolved brushes (GIH in particular) is a brain-killer. In particular:

  • the concept of "cells" is a complete mess to organize your work (basically draw several variants of a brush in the same layer instead of one per layer).
  • The dimension system is completely non-understandable in its current GUI.

https://docs.gimp.org/2.10/en/gimp-using-animated-brushes.html

Original Design

The assumptions are:

  • the multi-cell system may make sense if you want to see your brush variants side by side, same as when you create an icon set, you like to create them in a single file (to be later exported in separate images).
  • The dimension system is extremely interesting once you get to know it:

1. It allows for instance to create random variants of a same brush or simply incremental variants (always same order). These are the most common usages that you can see in GIH brushes around. 2. You can also create random variants depending on the moving angle, or depending on your tilt, pressure and speed. 3. Now you can also mix this, and that's when your brain starts to melt. Like random variants depending on moving angle (so for each angle range, you'd have a random list of possible imprint). Or you could even have variant for every (angle, tilt, pressure) combination, with some randomness or incremental designs in there. And so on. This is where the dimension system comes to play.

This is somewhat double usage with dynamics, yet still different. For instance dynamics allows you to modify things such as angle, aspect ratio, opacity, etc. In simple cases, this is enough (if not better). But the brush dimension system allows to have completely different drawings depending on various input. This is something dynamics doesn't provide.

Raised Issues

The following issues have been raised:

  • The format is extremely powerful but the current creation GUI is just too complex; as a consequence probably nearly none use the format at its full potential.

The currently GUI was properly just trying to reproduce the implementation graphically, which is the problem. We should not have to change the brush formats. For instance, the "dimension" logics makes perfect sense code-wise, simply you should not have to expose it.

Ideas

  • The various dimension criteria could be displayed in proper ways, specific to each criteria:
 * "Angular" could show as a full circle where variants depending on angle ranges would show around the circle.
 * "Speed" and "Pressure" could show linearly (left: low speed/pressure, right: high speed/pressure).
 * tilt could show as a half circle.
 * Incremental and random would show linearly.
 The goal would be to display and navigate brush variants on some GUI with above widgets to get a very quick and understandable overview of the brush.
  • It would be nice to be able to test the brush as you create it (rather than export, reload, test, export, reload, test…).
  • It would be nice to export directly the brush in the user brush folder. Of course exporting anywhere should still be a feature (for exchanging brushes), but the default "one click-no brainer" export should be for direct usage.
  • Rather than asking people to organize their layers in cels, maybe GIMP could be able to display brushes all side by side, or switch to editing one variant only, etc. Various viewing modes.

Basically I also think that GIH brush creation could become a core feature. Many of the above ideas would not work well as plug-in implementation (at least not with current API).