Paint material using face selection

[Thomas-QCD]

Is your feature request related to a problem?

Im frustrated with the painting tool. I paint with my cursor, typically for the purpose of assigning separate material. The paint tool is difficult to use, and there does not seem to exist an undo function for this

Describe the solution you'd like

Since there exists a feature to select face to align to build plate, I can assume code already exists to select a single face of the model, and if thats the case, it would seem easier to select faces of the model to "paint" material on

Describe alternatives you've considered

No alternatives exist

Affected users and/or printers

All users

Additional information & file uploads

No response

[GregValiant]

The Paint tool is a new feature and will have some growing pains.
I don't use the Material capability myself so this is just me looking in from the outside.

• Per this feature request - Ability to pick a face to paint. Large irregular areas can take a long time with the brush. A "bucket" tool for filling larger areas?
  • This could make painting material more accurate, and quicker.
  • What happens when the painted surface goes all the way to the edge? Would it stop short to create an "inset" of the 2nd material, or should it include the walls around the top surface? That would cause the material on the sides to change. It would be changing materials every layer.
• Ability to pick a depth.
  • The "depth of material" seems to be hard coded at 4mm(?) If it could be user a controlled depth (maybe with a minimum of 1 layer height??) it would add flexibility for the user.
• Ability to press and hold the "Shift" key to get orthogonal moves from the brush (ala AutoCAD and others) . Trying to free-hand straight lines with the mouse is tough.

@wawanbreton , Any thoughts?

[HellAholic]

For the Depth and precision, they are available to users on the front-end. in the settings tab for the material painting:

Paint by face proof of concept based on the current structure,
#21378

[wawanbreton]

Hi, I'm very glad that you made some feedback on this feature 🙂

• The per-face painting feature is a must-have indeed. @HellAholic made a POC that is super nice, however it needs some rework because the heavy calculation is done in the Python front-end and could be very slow on large models.
• Depth picking: already available indeed 🙂 however the fact that you didn't find it makes me think that the naming of the setting may be non-intuitive. Would you have a better suggestion ? Maybe display it directly on the material painting panel ?
• The shift-key for lines painting would also be very cool indeed. And very easy to implement actually, because under the hood we already draw lines to join the previous mouse position with the new one... (not trying to nerd-snipe anyone 🙄)

[PartySausage]

I'd welcome some sort of ortho mode for painting straight seams. This would be very very useful for my shaky mouse hand

[GregValiant]

"...the fact that you didn't find it..."

It never occurred to me to look in the Dual Extruder settings. I don't think it's a naming thing as much as a location thing. Right now there would seem to be 2 groups of settings disassociated from one another. I looked at the image HellAHolic posted a couple of times before going "Oh, they are way over here.". I use Aldo's plugins and so the posted image was different than my view of the Cura workspace, and the word "Paint" doesn't actually appear until half way down the settings tooltip.
You have to find the setting in order to find the setting.

I think my preference would be to add a new row to the "Paint Tool" on the left toolbar and have the Material button control their state/visibility. Since the left and right settings are certainly related - they should all be in proximity of each other.

If they were to stay under "Dual" then adding "Paint" to the setting description would be helpful.
"Paint-Multi-Mat'l Precision"
"Paint-Multi-Mat'l Depth"