Stretch and Bend settings for physical paint
Right now, physical paint rotates and stretches equally. So the more floppy the paint, the more it can rotate but also the farther it can stretch between flecks. In most cases, artists do not want it to stretch so far, if at all, but they need to turn up the floppiness so that the flecks rotate at each point.
Take, for example, hair. Paint would be perfect for this kind of thing, but without "managing" the floppiness it can easily lead to long streaks behind the character with substantial gaps between flecks. So then it loses the illusion of it being hair--or cloth, whatever you're using it for--and looks awful at speed.
There's a lot of characters with physical-paint-hair still, but the creator hasn't realised the floppy paint has this problem, or hasn't tested at sufficient speeds to notice it.
I think part of this is that most floppy materials IRL don't stretch enough to notice. My hair doesn't stretch, my clothes don't, antennas don't, grass doesn't, etc. As the expectation is that physical paint can be used to create such things, it's intuitive that physical paint wouldn't stretch (at least not far) also. But it super does, in some cases, which makes using it for such IRL-floppy materials more difficult.
As I say, there are tricks we can use to reduce floppiness while travelling at speed, but this won't be obvious especially to newcomers and creators who focus purely on art.
If we could have more nuanced control over the floppiness of physical paint I think this could really make this feature even more useful, and could allow it to be used a lot more than it currently is.
My ideas on this are to have 2 settings:
Stretch: for how easily the paint stretches. At 0, the flecks would not get further than they are without physics turned on, just as it does with 0 floppiness. Perhaps a caveat would be if the painting has "attached at both ends" and "attached to object" and the object is moved too far away, at which point the strokes would need to stretch to reach both ends.
Bend: for how far the stroke can bend/rotate at each fleck point--similar to a ball joint's limit setting. At 0, the flecks wouldn't bend at all, just as with 0 floppiness. But we could allow it to bend as much as we want without letting the flecks tear apart and leave gaps.
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