Porting Patches

[jlampel]

Patches is a great tool that allows for filling large areas with a grid of quads. Most importantly, it uses face nearest snapping rather than screen space snapping and works well even in areas that are partially occluded.

The main thing it's doing though is just a bridge or grid fill and then snapping the result to the surface. It cannot be used to draw new geometry from scratch, and it cannot be used when the result is not a perfect grid.

My thought for this one is that we could potentially skip it for the initial v4.0 release and bring it back in a different way in a later update. I have a few ideas for how Patches could be supercharged and more useful as a standalone tool, but for now I think we could get by with creating an operator that just fills an area depending on the type of selection and snaps the result (#1400). The other basic use cases are already handled well by Strokes, albeit in screen space.

In the short term, we would lose the ability to select which verts are considered as corners and to do some specific actions with face nearest snapping, but in the long term it frees us up to rethink how the tool works and to do much more interesting things with it in the future.

But I'm still kind of on the fence because I don't know how often this tool gets used. I personally don't use it a whole lot, but not everyone works the same as I do. I also don't know if porting it as-is would be a short task or a long one. If it's pretty easy and would just take an afternoon, it certainly wouldn't hurt, but I don't think it's worth holding up a release for a few weeks.

What do you think @vxlcoder, how much time would you estimate it would take to port Patches as-is?