Grease Pencil News - Stroke Sculpting, etc. Now in Master

Breaking news! This evening I merged the work that's been going on in the GPencil_Editing_Stage3 branch to master! Keep an eye out for the test builds coming out from later today or tomorrow to get your hands on these new features.



In other news, as promised, I've uploaded a video demonstrating how the "Additive Drawing" option can be used. I've got a few other demos of this I'd like to record + upload, but there are some other more pressing issues to deal with in the meantime. So I'll get to those when I can.



FAQ - Why Now, and What Next?
Perhaps the two biggest questions likely to arise from the merge today will be:
1) Why now/today?
2) What's next?

I'll try to answer both of these below.

~~~

There are still things I want to work on before feature freeze for the release. However, over the past week, I came to conclusion that it would be good to try and get the branch merged into master this weekend, and then continue to refine it from there.

Two of the major factors influencing this decision was that there were already quite a number of bugfixes + improvements in the branch, and the fact that the core parts of the new functionality have been stable for a while now.

Another was the general interest among the community for being able to get to try these tools. Creating, hosting/posting, and updating a set of test builds that most users who can't build their own builds so that they could try the tools would've ended up being quite a bit of a drag. Even via the buildbots, there's still quite a bit of manual labour + downloading/reuploading that needs to take place. So, with that in mind, it seemed like a good idea to get it into master, where an established system for getting the testbuilds out there for people to try is already in place.

~~~

Finally, on a bit more selfish level: I'll be heading off on a family vacation later this week for the holiday season, so I wanted to get this stuff into master before that (with a few days to spare, to deal with any unexpected emergencies that crop up) so that people could play with it over the holidays if they wanted.

One of the places we're heading is known for it's somewhat dodgy politics/practices, especially surrounding the use of the internet (among other things - fingers crossed everything goes well  ;) , so it's unlikely that I'll be able to see any correspondence for a few days while I'm there; hopefully internet access and/or mobile roaming will work in Hong Kong for us this time. Otherwise, it'll probably be over and out till the new year :)