Hi all.

I am currently working on some tweaks to the generated brushes (the brushes you can configure interactively). In Gimp CVS you can generate brushes like these:
http://www.home.unix-ag.org/simon/files/generated-brushes.png

Note, that currently the new functionality does not affect existing generated brushes. However, when I fiddeled with this stuff I got the impression, that the hardness-parameter should be a bit more extendable to the soft side of the brush - IMHO hardness 0.0 is not yet soft enough.

I have a patch sitting here, that makes more soft brushes possible, but since this patch still maps the range from 0 to 1 the hardness for existing generated brushes would effectively be reduced, i.e. existing brushes will look softer when loaded with the next release of the GIMP.

Do you think this is acceptable? Note that the current hardness could be reached easily by dragging the slider a bit upwards again.

Do you have lots of generated brushes sitting on your harddisk (look for files ending in ".vbr" in ~/.gimp-2.0/brushes/ )? Would you be upset if they'd change their look a little?

Thanks, Simon

Nathan Carl Summers (rock@gimp.org) wrote:

Is it possible to redo your logic so that the the old hardness scale is used, but it's possible to have negative hardness?

I thought about this and I don't like it. Although technically possible it IMHO doesn't make sense because a "Hardness" of -0.5 doesn't map to something easily understood.

Alternatively, we could use a fileformat versioning system to keep backwards compatibilty.

Right now the code saves backwards compatible brushes when the elliptical shape is selected and the Number of spikes is 2. When we abandon this, this is possible.

The question is: Is it worth it? I asked my original question to get a feel for the number of generated brushes out there that'd need to be changed. Jimmac told me on IRC that he has *one* generated brush he changes on the fly. For him the change in the hardness scale wouldn't pose a problem at all. I suspect that this is true for most users of generated brushes out there.

I'd like to avoid as much conversion crud as possible (although it might not be that hard if we abandon backwards compatibility as mentioned above).

Bye,
Simon