Yes. That’s the UI we all want. 
Btw, can I put the shelf on the right/left/top?
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Its easier to go over tiny icon, press and hold, open pop-up window and select brush, instead of having 10-20 brushes always available (where you can scroll) and just pick one?
How many of you actually tried the workflow before dismissing it, I wonder.
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Haven’t tested much but so far at a quick glance I really like this prototype, the only thing I’d have to say for now is that I second @nickberckley’s idea to have favorites, that would be awesome.
The interface works pretty good, but I think it could be useful to have the option to change the toolbar to be horizontal or vertical, in wide monitors the vertical space is reduced so a way to have the brushes on a vertical menu would be pretty handy.
And yes, a popup would be REALLY helpful. Also, if we get a popup to select brushes, could we set a custom shortcut to it?
A shortcut to cycle through brushes sounds pretty handy, though for me having a way to quickly access a popup that lets me search for the brush I need is more than enough.
Is this planned to work the same for paint and grease pencil brushes?
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This is exactly what that UI picture design is demonstrating…lol
It’s not obvious to me where the disagreement about the popup is.
About the button that opens the popup. There are a few considerations:
- For grease pencil currently and potentially other modes in the future, a brush can be combined with multiple tools in the toolbar. Besides freehand drawing, you can also have the brush applied along a line or other shape. So tying the brush to the tool is not ideal for that.
- Press and hold is a bit slower than press and open immediately, because there needs to be some distinction with selecting the tool vs. opening the popup. Some people don’t care about this, but from experience others don’t like these small delays.
- Does it really matter so much to have it be the toolbar button rather than another button?
Our plan is to have a popup with a list of brushes using new 3D icons, which is similar to ZBrush. This mockup on the other hand shows 2D vector icons, which at least in current Blender corresponds to tools rather than brushes.
Can you clarify if these are brushes or tools, and if the choice of 2D instead of 3D icons has any meaning?
Yes, it should definitely be accessible with a shortcut.
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It can be “press and open immediately”, as long as it’s possible to choose the brush when releasing the mouse. (Basically how menus work in blender).
Not much, I think. It could be another button. The placement of the button is what matters the most, and top left is kind of the ideal place for that. Also, if the button icon could change based on the active brush, it would be handy.
Oh, I’m sorry, this mockup looks like that because I made it years ago for another topic here, but I posted because the idea still fits.
And no, the 2D icons has no real meaning there.
This popup palette is meant to show a iist of brushes. So if it were made today, it would be filled with the new 3D icons.
I am of the opinion that the new brushes shelf should have shortcuts for toggling its appearance and for immediately searching and picking brushes. Having it always be visible is nice and all, but I think it could become way more effective if it was possible to do this:
Press a shortcut in the 3D viewport to search the currently active brush category and making the shelf appear → type in the letters for the brush → highlight the current brush with the closest name to what you typed → auto-activate the brush highlighted when going back to the viewport → auto-hide the shelf after use.
This would streamline the brush picking process by allowing you to custom tailor your brush collections and by having shortcuts for every brush without the need to set a shortcut for a specific brush in one collection. For instance, one brush could be named “B1 Blob” and another “B2 Blob”. Same type of brush, but with different settings. Because of the naming it is simply possible to press the search shortcut (i.e. “F”) and then search for either “B1” or “B2” to activate those brushes when going back to the canvas.
With this workflow you could rapidly type F + B + 1 to select the “B1 Blob” brush without having to go through your list manually to select it, thus speeding things up for power users. The shortcuts would also be completely custom tailored to every user’s needs by simply having a good naming standard for your brushes in that specific collection. Not to mention that the different brush categories would allow you to reuse all the letters and not just a select few letters that are dedicated to only a small selection of brushes.
Besides those suggestions, it’s looking promising. If I have more suggestions I’ll write them some other time.
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I just noticed that there is no operator for renaming your brush inside of the brushes shelf by R clicking. I know it’s possible elsewhere, but I would appreciate it if it was more direct.
What youre describing is basically modifier keys. And I know this debate has been had mulitple times with add menus but I mich prefer just typing names. Modifier keys include lot of remembering. Situation you described is very simple. But in more complex cases we end up with important brushes having worse keys than secondary ones because they come second alphabetically. You either have to do AAbrush names or something. Typing is much faster once you get used to it and lets you have proper names.
Tips for everyone:
Asset shelf can be opened and closed with key just like sidebar. In View menu assign shortcut to asset shelf. I have PR that simplifies this a bit hopefully accepted but its already possible.
Hover over asset shelf press Ctrl F and start typing to search
I think vertical real state is more important, i would keep this shelf closed and use a favorites pop up if given the option.
Brush cycling is not good since you might cycle pass your selection, really slow. I would rather have a temporary brush while holding the brush’s specific key and back to the previous one when letting go of that key. The same way the smooth brush works now but with other brushes.
One small bug I found is that scrolling with the middle mouse button and a pen tablet it needs 1/2 a tile to scroll one way and 1 1/2 to scroll the other way. If only one row is visible this makes it impossible to scroll downwards.
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I completely agree.
I don’t want 3d view to be narrowed up and down.
If pop ups were supported, I would hide the asset shelf and only use pop ups.
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Hi everyone, If the pop up will look like this I’ll probably end up hiding the asset shelf like many others users. In this case it should be essential to display active brush icon.
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I love this UI change.
Could we get a color option per folder of the asset libraries?
That way, we could more easily discern which group/folder of the asset library the Brush comes from and memorization kicks in faster. 
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It is still about typing the names. The difference is that you decide how stuff are named. Putting keywords on each brush name is one way to emulate shortcut keys without the need to assign any key besides the search function.
Ctrl+F didn’t work for me when using my own shortcuts. Do you think it would be possible to activate the search function in the viewport as well with some of the other suggestions I made? Would be pretty amazing.
To satisfy people annoyed by addition of Status bar that display too much useful info to be hidden, of Topbar and toolbar setting and now, horizontal Asset Shelf ; we could imagine a similar vertical alternative, where catalogs tabs stays as is, but assets are displayed vertically.
Advantage could be that Toolbar could be customizable and have its own catalogs list of tools created by users and/or automatically by addons.
Inconvenient from my quick mock-up will be that toolbar could not be displayed, at same time.
But we could imagine a third display of a column split in two parts. One showing tools and the other showing assets.
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Video with the steps to crash Blender when duplicating an asset. It also crashes if it is duplicated directly.
blender-4.2.0-alpha+brush-assets-project.151e5f4fe249-windows.amd64-release
I found this weird bug where I imported brush settings from the old system into the new one. The new brush icons appear as grey squares if you save one of the imported brushes as a new brush asset. For the Scrape/Fill brush I had one called “A TrimAdaptive”, which I saved as “TA1 TrimAdaptive”.
Notice how the sidebar uses the old preview image, but it doesn’t appear as such in the brushes shelf (grey square).
Got some more feedback. I think there should be a way to replace the modifier shortcuts for brushes with other brushes. For instance, now when Smooth is just another brush on the list, does it make sense to have it be the only brush that is accessible when holding down shift? What if I prefer Slide Relax for smoothing over Smooth instead? I think it would be very convenient if ctrl, shift, and alt could be switched out so you could have up to 4 different brush types accessible at all times with modifier keys.
The alt key may be the most tricky to design this way because of every brush having alternative ways of brushing, but as a way to avoid such an issue there could be an option to override this setting by either having the default behaviour or having another brush take its place with either its primary or alternate brushing method active.
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