Improving the Brush Display

[jlampel]

One of the pieces of feedback we got recently was on the brush display. I don't think it's hugely important as it doesn't change the functionality, but I do agree with them.

Lastly, a more personal point is that I think the current visual of the brushes looks a little obnoxious. It kind of blocks the view with the color in between. I personally prefer the minimalistic look of the native blender brushes.

@jfranmatheu When you have time / if you ever need a break from v3 performance improvements, do you want to work on this? It seems right up your alley. Again, it's not critical, so no rush if you're in the zone with v3.

Right now, we have two types of brushes in v4:

Tweak and Relax use these solid-colored brushes where the radius is the outside circle, the strength is the color opacity, and the falloff is the inner circle. PolyStrips and Strokes use a simpler brush that is just a white circle for the size with a smaller, mostly transparent white circle around the cursor.

Tweak and Relax	PolyStrips and Strokes

For comparison, Blender's sculpt brushes are a thin colored circle for the size, with a semi-transparent inner circle for the strength. The falloff is displayed as a curve and as a gradient when adjusting the brush strength.

Size and Strength	Strength and Falloff

Do you think you could help our brushes look more like Blender's? I don't think they have to be exactly the same (in fact, making the lines just slightly thicker would be really nice), but a similar style would help quite a bit. Also smoothing them out using the same tricks that you used in UV Flow would help them look amazing.

[jfranmatheu]

Looks good to me to have a more consistent or Blender-friendly display, but I don't feel the falloff necessary to be represented exactly as the sculpt-paint cursor as for sculpt-paint it has sense to have the gradient and lately the curve as it is, but for retopology tools it feels like the gradient-curve does not add a lot of info but rather confusion: in sculpt-paint, the "gradient" is actually the texture to apply (we don't have any texture in RF tools) and the curve is the falloff curve that applies over that texture (that, again, is not present in RF) to smooth and sharpen it from the center to the borders based on that curve.

So I think that while we can stick to some convention for the brush size and falloff strength, we can still innovate in the display of other attributes as there is no precedent of built-in tools similar to the ones RF introduces.

[jlampel]

Awesome, and I agree that for falloff we don't need to match Blender exactly since ours is different. I do think showing a falloff gradient while adjusting the strength would be a nice touch since it shows very visually how the strength is being affected, but I don't think it's crucial. A nice clean brush that doesn't block the view while working would be good enough for me.