ToothPaste 1.1.6 is out!

It’s that time of the year again, and ToothPaste has a new version.
Not sure what ToothPaste is? Learn more about the ToothPaste (Paste SVGs) plugin for Blender

At the time I’m writing this, ToothPaste has already reached over 3.1K downloads, a few (stellar!) reviews, and, honestly, I couldn’t be happier. But as every software product goes, it too needs an update.

Intro

As I’m the only person stress-testing it right now, it takes quite a while to figure out what feature needs improvement and where the workflow breaks. I’ve been using ToothPaste more and more within my own process, and I’ve inevitably discovered a few flaws that hinder the plugin’s viability as a major vector-to-Blender tool. Right now, ToothPaste works great - most layers/groups show up properly, vector placement has been accurate for a few versions, and colors render exactly as they should. What bugged me though, were a few use cases where I needed to take extra steps to get the job done without breaking my flow.

SVG import

A pretty crucial one was being limited to only copy/pasting into Blender. As I’m building my own library of reusable graphics, I found that a bit clunky and limiting. When I’ve just finished designing my artwork and want to use it in Blender, ToothPaste is fast and reliable. But when it comes to importing an existing vector, one I’d already saved to an SVG, being required to open the vector app (Affinity, Illustrator, Figma or Inkscape) to simply import it, was not only an extra step; it took extra time I could’ve spent animating. I had to wait for the app to load, look for the vector file, open it, copy and paste, and then - voila! It’s in Blender. Simple, easy, and quick, right?

Yeah, no. Not having the ability to import SVGs through File > Import or drag and drop felt like missing basic functionality. This makes building an actual library of files to reuse actually viable - something I’d done within my After Effects workflow. 

File connections in Blender

This brings me to another big question I had - can Blender retain the connection, a link if you will, to the original SVG file? Short answer is no - I discovered Blender only “remembers” links to .blend files, a limitation that feels a bit weird, considering you can essentially link texture files (think PNGs, JPEG, even PSDs in some cases). This matters because changes made to the SVG file won’t reflect back into Blender. You can always re-import the SVG, but if any adjustment work was done after importing, I’d need to go over it again. Not the workflow I quite imagined, but it’s still better than the default. It makes one wonder if PDF and AI files might be viable for import too, down the line.

Source-accurate text and images

SVGs (and PDF, AI) files sometimes have images and live editable text living inside of them. While Blender doesn’t do curves/grease pencil as masks for images, and I can’t seem to work out a way for editable text to get a decent import, it’s still crucial that the import itself is as close to the source as possible. With that in mind, images now aren’t of a barn door, and text is no longer editable, but it’s font-accurate as a curve/grease pencil object from the initial import.

Layer to vertex connection in Grease Pencil

One final feature I was missing, and couldn’t wrap my head around, is selecting the vertices located on the selected Grease Pencil layer — I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what layer contained what vertices. The only way I discovered it was the M shortcut to move the selection to a new layer, and a pencil icon indicated the current one. This makes vertices feel kind of detached from the layer, although they’re highly dependent on it. So that’s another small addition — now a set of two new buttons right below the layer list becomes active when a layer is selected, and allows me to select the vertices located inside said layer!

Code refactoring

Last but not least, I threw in a bit of a refactor of the code, and now the main init.py is only a few lines and all major functionality is split into a set of new .py files. This makes it way easier to review and adjust the codebase, so future releases will be simpler to do, hopefully. I did this one for me mostly, as the average user wouldn’t even know it happened, but it brought a great deal of improvements already, and allowed for 1.1.6 to be such a huge update.

This was kind of long, and if you got to this point I thank you, the kind reader. I hope you found my thought process for this update interesting and informative. And feel free to reach out if you have any feedback — email me!

Get the ToothPaste (Paste SVGs) plugin on the Blender Extensions website.

See you around the block,

Todor