ideas for improving Armor Paint

[sanya-2005]

having worked in Armor Paint and compared it with other programs, I would like to offer you improvements. there are a lot of ideas. some are purely functional, others affect the design of the program. I hope you pay attention

1. the ability to make a mask from a layer, just drag and drop it under the fill layer
2. displaying thumbnails of images in the browser. of course, it's possible that this has already been done, and it just doesn't work for me due to some circumstances.
3. the menu for adding nodes, which can be called by a hotkey
4. improved work with the color ramp node. at the moment it is difficult to use it
5. double-clicking on the thumbnail of the painting layer will open a 2d view, as it has already been done with fill layers
6. search in the browser in real time, not after pressing enter
7. browser redesign. I moved the buttons to move up the hierarchy and add a folder to the left of the box in which the added folders will be located, also swapped the path box and the search box, since I think that the search will be used more
   
8. a small change in the meshes tab. this is replacing the list of names with square thumbnails of meshes with names under them (by analogy with materials)
9. it would be nice if moving the slider and manually entering the value were not activated at the same time (at the moment you need to click on the slider box so that manual input of the value is activated, but this will also cause the slider to shift to the place of the click)
10. adding the smear tool from the blender
    there is also a rather global and complex, but very cool idea. it consists in the ability to edit the layout of windows. I don't have enough of this, I can't properly organize a working space
    despite these ideas, I think it's better to still focus on fully supporting cycles nodes and adding new ones.

[Wario-Ametrano]

if you want on this page there has been a lot of talk about improvements like yours for armorpaint #1069

[MathemanFlo]

Some of your ideas are already implemented.

1. Masks are grey scale images. You basically propose that it is converted to greyscale automatically?
2. Unfortunately there is no option except for materials (which have a thumbnail). Your idea has been proposed in Usability Improvements for Browser #814 and I agree this is one of the browser most needed missing features.
3. Press "Space" then you get a menu to search for a node. It can be completely done by keyboard. Is that what you are looking for?
4. You already proposed that in improve work with the Color Ramp node #1085. I still like the idea.
5. I don't get it. Double clicking on any layer will open the 2d view if it is closed. Otherwise it will close it.
6. I completely agree.
7. It has been proposed in Smear Tool Request #958 and there is a Directional option for a while. It's not perfect but it should do what you would like to achieve (more or less :-) )

[sanya-2005]

1. 1. No, no. I mean the ability to take a layer, drag it under the material and make a mask out of it. Now I realized that this may contradict the construction of the hierarchy of layers, but, nevertheless, I would like to have some way to quickly create a mask from a layer without resorting to a workaround by exporting to an image or creating a mask material by taking data from the layer, which, due to the bug I discovered, would not be particularly convenient
2. yes, this is what is missing, only the division of nodes into categories
3. yes, it turned out to work, but it's very strange. in some moments, the 2d view opens immediately, in others, even if you click the thumbnail, it will not open. I can't figure out how it works, and what it depends on

[luboslenco]

Thanks for these ideas, really appreciate it. Some have already been implemented, will continue working to implement the rest.

it would be nice if moving the slider and manually entering the value were not activated at the same time (at the moment you need to click on the slider box so that manual input of the value is activated, but this will also cause the slider to shift to the place of the click)

This should be resolved.

a small change in the meshes tab. this is replacing the list of names with square thumbnails of meshes with names under them (by analogy with materials)

Still want to do this and more.