Started by Matt, December 07, 2024, 04:12:41 AM
Quote===================Build 2024-12-06.03===================== Sky Paint ==Sky Paint is a new painting system in Terragen Sky. It can be accessed via the SKY PAINT workspace button at the top of the UI.Things to Try: - Click on the SKY PAINT workspace button. - Use the Canvases panel to select different cloud layers to paint on. - Hit the Space Bar to enter Edit Mode to see a list of all your strokes and their properties. - In Edit Mode you can migrate a stroke layer (group of strokes) between Canvases by simply dragging an item from the Layers listview to an item on the Canvases listview. - You can delete a stroke layer with the Delete key when it is selected. - You can also delete a stroke layer in normal painting mode (outside of Edit Mode) if you have the Move tool or Stir tool selected and you hover over or near a layer to highlight it, then press the Delete key. - Move the camera and paint from a different viewpoint. Any viewpoints you painted from will appear as buttons at the top of the viewport. - Hover over the viewpoint buttons to temporarily preview them. Click on them to switch to the viewpoint. - Undo and Redo should work for most things. Some thing like switching canvases or tools are not undoable. They could be made undoable if we want them to be. - The viewport is split Left/Right by default, but you can change this. The SKY PAINT workspace has "sub-" or "child-" workspaces for Left/Right Split, Top/Bottom Split and and Paint Only viewports. Buttons for these sub-workspaces appear when you click on the SKY PAINT workspace button and disappear when you move the mouse away from them. - Sky presets can include paint vector data. - Exported .tgd and .tgc files can include paint data which can be rendered in Terragen 4 since build 4.8.23. - Paint nodes are retargeted to a new cloud layer when you change a cloud layer preset.Potentially Confusing Interactions: - You might be painting on a particular cloud layer and wonder why it's not responding to the paint. This can happen if you have paint on another canvas that's affecting the cloud you think you're painting, but the paint for the other canvas isn't showing because you don't have that canvas selected. This can happen because each cloud layer can be affected by two canvases: "Paint All" as well as the canvas dedicated to just that cloud layer. - If you move the camera and paint from multiple viewpoints, it's not always clear how the viewpoints interact with other.Known Issues and Known Unknowns: - "Calibrating paint" takes longer than we would like. - Undo/Redo has not been thoroughly tested when choosing presets (sky or individual layers) that use paint data or destroy paint data. Maybe it works; maybe it doesn't. - There will be problems at the edges and corners of the cube maps that the paint is baked onto. - The way that clouds respond to paint is subject to further research and development. In particular we want to make cloud edges look more natural. - If the Coverage setting on Cloud 2 or Cloud 3 is too close to 0, "Cloud Add" will stop working properly. Coverage 0.1 seems to be pretty good if you want to start with a nearly clear sky, and you can remove the remaining bits with some paint. - Self-shadowing and shading/multi-scattering is sometimes wrong, and this is because the voxel buffers don't always update after painting. You can force the voxel buffers to update by disabling and then re-enabling a cloud layer.== Other Improvements ==Background/reference image in the viewport: - A background/reference image can be enabled with the 'B' key. Pressing 'B' cycles through 3 modes: On, Semi-Transparent, Off. - You can use Shift + B on the keyboard to open the "Reference Images and Projections" editor, where you can load an image and adjust its projection settings. - Note: Images are not saved in the project in this version, but projection settings are saved.Added a 'Dialog' menu which lets you to toggle the "Edit Mode" (for paint) and "Reference Images and Projections" windows without needing to know the keyboard shortcuts.Added a Help menu with a link to the Online Documentation. The SysInfo and License buttons have been moved to the Help menu.Fixed a couple of bugs that made the UI slower after the app had been running for some time.Save file dialogs will ask before overwriting an existing file.Text for the auto-save filename is written in red if the file already exists when the Render Image button is pressed, to warn you that it will be overwritten. (You can click on the text to choose a new filename.)The "Square" render aspect ratio is now called "1:1" to make it more readable in the dropdown menu.Bug fix: Resizing the viewport or resizing/minimizing/maximizing the main window was causing the preview to start rendering from scratch if it had already finished rendering.Panning/navigation cursor is the default pointer, not the pointing hand.Loop-around has been disabled on the roller widgets for most parameters, and enabled on a few parameters where it makes sense.Minor improvements to the Undo system.
