In nuce: In a blog post by developer Joseph “Joe” Eagar, the Blender Foundation announces which sculpting features will be included in the next Blender version. If the releases of the next versions follow Blender’s roadmap, Blender 3.2 and 3.4 will be released this year (we reported on 30 December 2021).
Blender’s beautiful new sculpting features: One of the main functions is to be able to paint vertex colours even when you are currently in Sculpt mode. However, the function is experimental for the time being, but according to the blog post it already offers improved performance compared to the previous vertex painting mode – and supports masks, face sets and filters. In the blog post, Eagar also explains that users can paint other vertex attributes as well as surface colours. In addition, the painting tools are now also supported with cavity masking. This should enable you to align brush strokes (paint strokes) according to the surface curvature – always depending on the geometry concerned. This would also automatically emphasise edges or depressions.
Preview sculpting with Eevee – is that possible? Blender’s real-time renderer Eevee should now make it possible to interactively display changes that have been made. Eevee previews are initially supported in Sculpt mode – provided you use Dynamic Topology (Dyntopo). One of the new features of Dyntopo itself is that edge boundaries are better preserved, including UV seams and face sets. In addition, Dyntopo is now said to be significantly faster and also supports “just-in-time” triangulation. With just-in-time, an entire mesh is no longer triangulated.
Outlook: What can we expect with Blender 3.2 and 3.4? Among the features that these upcoming releases are expected to bring is an improvement for texture painting, or an extension of vertex painting to a general “attribute paint” mode. In addition, Multires Sculpting and Brush Management are among the key components of upcoming Blender versions.
Click further: The corresponding blog post by developer Joseph Eagar can be found at code.blender.org.
