This is a list of some of the major planned features for Flowpaint.

Planned features and feature-ideas

Features are grouped together by area, and sorted in implementation order from simple to more complex within each group.

Brushes

• Enable users to create brushes by combining components such as gradients, matemathical functions, existing pictures, and parametrizing them with data read from stroke input, on-screen sliders, or hand-tweaked constants.
• Picture Brushes, introducing a new kind of rendering type for brushes, where pictures are stamped along a brush path or distributed around it in some pattern. Useful for spray-paint effects, forest ground leaf cover -type brushes, and so on.

Canvas

• Introduce the infinite canvas, with intuitive panning and zooming.
• Re-target resolution. Too low resolution in your picture for a full screen wallpaper? No problem - change the resolution, and automatically re-render the brush strokes and other picture information at the new resolution.
• Wrap around support, with a simple wrapping canvas layout to create seamlessly tiling pictures.
• Canvas layout editing, with possibility to create your own zones or wrappings, or import them from externally generated files (e.g. for seamless 3D model texture editing).

Layers

• Layer support
• Combination effects for layers and brush strokes, calculate the new picture data by combining the existing and new picture channels with configurable formulas, or use some of the pre-defined effects, such as the traditional burn, multiply, saturate, etc.

Sketchbook

• Add the Sketchbook, a way to keep track of the pictures you have created with FlowPaint. Sort pictures by date, tag them and categorize them by project, and quickly re-open them when needed (without needing to close down your current picture). Returning to a picture brings up the tools that were open when working on it, allowing you to easily continue from where you left off.
• Comes pre-filled with a set of hand-crafted default brushes and templates.
• You can also use the sketchbook to store brushes and other settings directly, using the same tagging and categorizing features as for pictures.
• Re-use brushes, layers, or other parts of your old pictures in your new ones, or use old pictures and settings as templates for new ones.
• Network your sketchbook, providing a library of categorized and rated brushes, templates, and other settings that people have contributed, and publish your own creations for others to use and review.

Areas

• Introduce AreaFills - specify a background color for your infinite canvas, or use a procedural noise or other texture, or a random combination of seamless tiles.
• Creating areas and shapes, with a Brush style along the outline, and an interior AreaFill.
• Create an area by clicking on a point - the closest enclosing strokes (on a specified layer) are found, and an area created along the edges of the strokes.
• Possibility to treat strokes (on some specified layer) as blocking edges for brush rendering - allowing easy shading of line art without need to create masks along non-closed line boundaries.

Picture Channels

• Support for user defined picture data channels. Add a height-dimension to your brushes and generate bump and normal maps for your 3D textures.

Parametrizable pictures

• Allow pictures to specify some parameters, and generate content based on them. May require some scripting support. These pictures could then be used as brush textures for example. This could also be used for picture templates, that make it easy to create a picture for a specific purpose (e.g. designing a button image for a website)
• Implement a command line mode and library API, that takes a FlowPaint picture file, and any parameters for it, and generates an output png or jpg picture, or fills a requested memory area with the picture. This could be used for example to generate character specific textures in a game, based on appearance attributes for the character.