Painting with brush focus instead of brush hardness?

SmallPoly

This is a sort of a "does anyone know of" post. I'm looking for a digital painting tool that can tie brush softness to a % of the canvas size instead of a % of the brush size so brushes don't get sharper as they get smaller, making it more efficient to paint things out of focus in textures, silhouettes, concept art, etc.

What usually happens is on the left, and what I'm looking for is on the right:


It seems like every program I come across handles brush blurriness in the same way - as a percent of the current size. It often only works for a basic round brush, and only sometimes can be used with alpha brushes. Photoshop can't blur custom brushes, while ZBrush sort of can but applies the alpha after the blur.

It totally makes sense why this wouldn't be implemented in most programs for bitmap based brushes, but I have a hard time figuring out why I've never seen it as an option for the round brush. Surely if PS can handle that brush's focus in real time relative to the size since it was first implemented, why couldn't it be done based off a set distance instead?

So has anyone ever seen a program where this kind of option exists? I'm curious to try it out if it does. I'm also curious about painting programs that let you adjust the focus of bitmap-based brushes.

pasha_sevez

I know the way how to non-destructively paint the way you want in PS. I've discovered this way occasionly. The only limitation is that you can't paint an arbitrary layer - only the layer masks. It's ok in many cases actually. So the main point is that when you've created a layer with mask, use mask refinement feature to feather the mask in realtime. It may be laggy - depends on your computer specs, but it works exactly this way.

pior

Another option if you don't mind the focus effect to applied over the whole stroke would be to assign a box blur or gaussian blur filter over a paint layer converted into a smart object. 

You could then play with the Blur intensity after the fact for full control.

SmallPoly

Thanks for the responses! I knew about the smart layer one but hadn't come across the mask one yet.  I hope someone implements it for real at some point.