Merged Sculpt "Groups" (No edit-list merging)
Merging 2 lists of edits into one list of edits is kind of a no-go, and I understand why. This is a very different method of achieving the same thing. (A long time ago I posted something like this to the old forum, but it seems to have disappeared. But I've got a better idea for implementation now anyway so that's fine ;P)
First, some background: Sculpts are stored as a list of edits. Each edit is a shape and how it affects the surface in different ways, the most obvious being positive and negative volumes.
A point is chosen to check against all those edits, and an algorithm is used to find how far it is from the surface of the sculpt. This is positive for inside the sculpt and negative for outside (or visa versa), so the closer you are to 0, the closer to the surface you get. Then you make a voxel at the surface point--which is what uses "sculpt shape" thermo memory.
Merging 2 lists of edits would be a nightmare, as some negatives would affect positives of another sculpt, which is unintuitive. So figuring out how to order that stuff would be a big ask. And an equally big ask to put on the creators who would have to learn how those rules work to understand what is going to happen when the merge edit-lists.
Here's the actual idea... Don't process the sculpts to make a new sculpt, when you click the button. Instead, make a special kind of group containing multiple sculpts. And at sculpt-building time, when the scene loads, add an extra layer on top of the usual SDF-to-voxel process for an edit list.
Check the same point in each list separately, and compare them. Check each edit-list (from different sculpts). If it's at the surface of one, but inside the shape of another sculpt, don't put a surface there. If it's at the surface of both edit-lists, or at the surface of one and outside of the other, put a surface there.
Maybe this would be equivalent to taking the highest value (most "in a sculpt") as the point's SDF value, and building the voxels in the exact same way.
So you're not merging edit lists, but using a new process on top of the existing SDF checking. You're comparing the positive results of each sculpt to be merged. As I understand it, that *should* work okay. And not have any fiddly merging rules to learn.
The sculpts within the "merged sculpt group" could be moved, changed, etc. Tinting could be carried through to the surface's voxels. No keyframing of anything inside a "merged sculpt group" though, for the same reasons we cannot keyframe edits inside a normal sculpt.
Theoretically... we could even mark a sculpt as "negative" to cut away at another sculpt. (And potentially blend between them, depending on how that's done?)
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