Symmetry/Mirror Painting in GIMP

prokoudine · **Joined:** Sep 20, 2011 **Posts:** 54

Jehan Pages made first results of his community-sponsored work on symmetry painting in GIMP publicly available.

The feature is available in all painting tools (Brush, Pencil, Eraser, Smudge, Ink, Clone etc.).

The source code is currently in its own Git branch, but will be merged into main development branch before v2.10 is out.

Dedicated branch in Git: https://git.gnome.org/browse/gimp/log/?h=multi-stroke

YouTube video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwPY0sTiVPk

Jehan's blog post: http://girinstud.io/news/2015/03/symmet ... be-merged/

LGW article: http://libregraphicsworld.org/blog/entr ... table-gimp

Additionally, there's some work being done on MyPaint brush engine support again.

Corvo · **Joined:** Oct 24, 2014 **Posts:** 49

Good. Congratulation to Pages.

Quote:

Probably the next step of such a feature would be to have an API to allow plug-in developers to easily implement their own symmetries. I believe this would not be very complicated to implement too.

josephbupe · **Posted:** Fri Apr 03, 2015 4:51 am **(#3)**

Joseph

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16057

This is awesome. I am compiling for Windows 64 bit now. I can't wait to test this out in real time.

viewtopic.php?f=7&t=12271&p=166251#p166251

Brogun · **Joined:** Apr 29, 2012 **Posts:** 110

Amazing ! Looks like the tool is more powerful than i was expecting it to be, at least more powerful than the symmetry painting i'm using with the Mypaint window builds.
It appears to be much more complete and customisable with settings than i thought, great addition to Gimp.

I hope we'll be able to playtest this new tool soon enough with one of the nightly builds.

Jehan · **Joined:** May 11, 2015 **Posts:** 12

Hi all,

Happy that you like it. It has indeed been done quite generic. Ultimately the idea could be that people should even be able to add their own "symmetry operations". We could imagine an API for this.
That's not possible right now though, since no API have been made for this. Just a thought for a possible future outcome. :-)

Erisian · **Posted:** Tue May 12, 2015 1:24 am **(#7)**

An amazing new tool. I'm looking forward to it.

prokoudine · **Joined:** Sep 20, 2011 **Posts:** 54

Just in case, symmetry painting has finally landed to the main development branch and will be available in 2.9.4 (currenty has to be enabled on the Playground page in the Preferences dialog).

Simple, lame screenshot: http://i.imgur.com/ljvpKRU.png

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16057

Thank you prokoudine. Great news.

jazzon · **Posted:** Thu Feb 04, 2016 1:45 pm **(#10)**

This looks like a tool that will have OMG and Pat625 crawling all over it! I can see the threads rolling in now!

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12781

Cool, but I would rather have a wrap feature (left side to right; up to down) in order to easily create seamless textures.

Odinbc · **Posted:** Thu Feb 04, 2016 6:37 pm **(#12)**

lylejk wrote:

Cool, but I would rather have a wrap feature (left side to right; up to down) in order to easily create seamless textures.

Would G'MIC Array [mirrored] xy-axes (in '/Arrays & tiles/') work for you?

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12781

You cannot paint in real time Odin. If you can set the layer to wrap, then you you can commence to painting using various brushes to make seamless textures. Yes; you can used G'MIC and other methods to create seamless textures as well, but they are more cumbersome.

josephbupe · **Posted:** Fri Feb 05, 2016 1:07 am **(#14)**

And I love the new themes and icons. Thank you prokoudine and Jehan for your good work.

Jehan · **Joined:** May 11, 2015 **Posts:** 12

lylejk wrote:

Cool, but I would rather have a wrap feature (left side to right; up to down) in order to easily create seamless textures.

The new symmetry painting has this. Even though the feature began with axis/point "symmetry", it actually ended up as a rewrite of part of the painting core of GIMP to allow what I call "multi-stroke" painting. On this new core, I have implemented 3 different kinds of "multistroke" painting: "symmetry", "mandala" (rotational symmetry) and "tiling".

This last one is the one you want. If you set the tiling as a perfect division of your image dimension, then any painting will automatically "wrap" on the canvas border, allowing you to draw seamless textures without even breaking a sweat. :-)

lylejk · **Joined:** Sep 24, 2010 **Posts:** 12781

Very cool Jehan; thanks for the additional info and definitely for your effort with this. Hopefully it will be part of the next GIMP release (and released soon).

Odinbc · **Posted:** Fri Feb 05, 2016 3:50 pm **(#17)**

lylejk wrote:

You cannot paint in real time Odin. If you can set the layer to wrap, then you you can commence to painting using various brushes to make seamless textures. Yes; you can used G'MIC and other methods to create seamless textures as well, but they are more cumbersome.

Thanks lylejk (I misread), got it now. That is an interesting feature. :bigthup

MareroQ · **Posted:** Sun Feb 07, 2016 8:29 am **(#18)**

Samj Créations
Version de développement Gimp 2.9.3 Portable 32 bits et 64 bits Windows 20160206.
http://samjcreations.blogspot.it/search?updated-min=2016-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&updated-max=2017-01-01T00:00:00-05:00&max-results=21
Already it contains symmetry and Mypaint.

SysTemX · **Joined:** Dec 08, 2013 **Posts:** 1088

Thanks for SamJ update MareroQ.

Rod · **Joined:** May 16, 2010 **Posts:** 16057

MareroQ shouldn't that be version GIMP-2.9.5? The GIT Master is at 4 already.