Brushes are stored in asset libraries instead of each .blend file. When creating a brush the asset library to put them in can be chosen.
The built-in brushes moved to the Essentials library shipped with Blender, featuring redesigned brush previews.
The asset shelf is the place to select brushes, instead of the toolbar. It appears horizontally across the bottom of the 3D Viewport and Image Editor in sculpt and paint modes.
When checking the assets, I noticed that the tooltips are kind of not helpful currently. I’d like it if they would show the asset name and description.
I can’t open General catalog and have access to sub-catalogs in Asset Shelf popover.
At each click press, the popover closes itself.
So, I can’t have sub-catalogs of General catalog as Asset Shelf tabs.
Add & Substract, Contrast, Transform, Utilities catalogs are only accessible from Tool Settings bar or Shift Space Popover.
I have to create my custom catalogs at a level open by default.
It is also annoying that a click and drag to open/close several tabs of asset shelf is not possible either.
hi @julianeisel , quick look
in your screenshot the active brush has the blue background:
in main this is broken, so no way to visually distinguish the active brush.
the content in the shelf flickers when i undo.
the default preview size is 48, but if i right click it and choose “reset to default value” it jumps to 32. is that intended?
i wish the popup was resizable. also an option to hide/show the “tree list” panel would be great.
Its possible to add a short cut, but Âżis going to be possible to assign brushes to quick favorites? or some other thing to be able to configure fast acces?
Haven’t tested much but so far the main feedback I have is about UI/UX:
A way to visually highlight the selected brush is important, right now is a bit confusing
A way to scroll horizontally makes more sense (and it’s more comfortable) if the shelf is horizontal, maybe if the shelf could be switched to be horizontal or vertical the scroll motion should change accordingly too.
When creating a new brush asset, Blender crashes when setting falloff to custom.
Also noticed that it’s not possible to add brushes to quick favorites.
No brush name on tooltip, most likely necessary for first users
Change size of icons seems to be per mode… not global. Might be a nicer UX if this were per “shelf” setting, like scaling the shelf size with CTLR+MMB works for all modes in the sidebar. This is an interface scale, not a mode interface scale as a desired UX… might be a personal opinion. - Category Tabs Panel is really hard to use, as you click on an check box and it closes… Should remain open. I was in sculpt mode when trying to use it in this gif.
No ability to add a direct shortcut to brush, I know these are dynamic and probably similar to enums or lists, but indeed it is a hot requested feature and a UX regression, previously you could set a hotkey to brush tool types, now not possible.
No ability to assign hotkey to a category of brushes, same dilemma as previous point.
I was thinking exactly the same but wasn’t sure how to redact the comment, i was expecting to use Ctrl+mmb (i use emulate mmb so its Ctrl+alt+LMB for me its the same) to scale the shelf so much.
Also because there is no “scale” controls or filters in “full screen Area” (Ctrl+alt+space bar)
I agree with most UX points made above: better tooltips, flicker on undo, active highlight, opened catalogs not saved, and of course different asset shelf settings in every mode, which I hate with burning passion.
This time I focused on asset bundle creation when testing, and this is what I found:
First of all, bug when duplicating asset. It shows this, brush settings disappear and you get error in console
After you manually select that newly created brush from asset shelf settings come back, but before it looks like this. And this is the error
sub.active = (brush and brush.sculpt_tool != 'MASK')
^^^^^^^^^^
TypeError: bpy_struct: item.attr = val: UILayout.active expected True/False or 0/1, not NoneType
I created brushes, and then when I wanted to bundle them I looked into their folder and couldn’t find which brush was which, because I renamed them in UI after creation, but .asset.blend files keep the name of creation, so first name. This is really inconvinient and I’m not sure about manually changing names as it might break them, but even if I were to do that, I don’t know which brush is which. Renaming brushes is too common for this not to work. asset.blend files need to be renamed so that names are always in sync.
I created ton of brushes, but didn’t want them all in one bundle, I wanted to pick brushes I put in Painting catalog in their own bundle, but its a lot of work because ALL the brushes are saved in same folder if you use one library. They just pile up and make organizing difficult. I would really appreciate it if instead of one Brushes folder, they were stored in separate folders named after catalogs, so that I can quickly zip catalogs and don’t have to use workarounds like too many libraries.
I want to add tags to brush assets, but its impossible since they’re not in Edit Metadata operator. I need tags not just for organizing, but for my custom scripts, I would appreciate if tags were added in the operator, as well as License and Copyright, which might be important for brushes that use licensed textures.
I cannot recreate this here. Could you try using factory settings? Maybe it’s a theming issue.
This is unfortunately a known issue with the asset system currently. It’s an architectural issue with the file browser backend that the asset system still uses for preview loading. I have time allocated over summer to work on this, see #122439: Finish Asset System Refactor.
That was a decision made early on, I think based on feedback from @JulienKaspar. Memory is fuzzy but I think it’s because names become a lot less useful when dealing with 100s of brushes (a lot of them being just small variations) and the preview becomes more important instead.
It’s also useful to be able to display a lot of brushes, names take away space and the previews need to be quite big for the name to fit anyway. Generally the asset shelf (as opposed to the popup version) attempts to be a bit space saving, since it’s on screen permanently.
Lastly, it’s broken currently, but the brush asset shelf is supposed to have quick tooltips:
That might be a “best of both worlds” compromise.
The missing active highlight bug might be a Windows only issue. I suspect because of slashes vs. backslashes in paths (we use relative paths to identify assets in certain cases).
