For that case there is the UI slider. If I’m using a tool like smooth or mask pen I kinda do it on the fly instead of a deliberate thing. So I would not expect a seconday overlayed hotkey for strength or size.
It would be great if the sliders in the UI reflect the strength and scale of the brush while using the hotkey. It’s kind of how the other big sculpting app does it but it’s really fluent to use. For example switching into smooth brush just to be able to adjust the strength of the smooth and then realizing that it’s a little too soft when I use the hotkey is always a hassle. If I could adjust the tool strength in the UI while holding the hotkey - that would be friggin awesome.
Sure - in most cases the tablet pressure will adjust the strength of the smoothing (or draw opacity, mask opacity etc.) but if the fine tuning is needed for a stretch of work then it’s usually much faster to:
hotkey acitvate the mask
adjust strength/poacity
try it out
readjust strength
try out with another stroke
adjust back a little bit
work
going in and out of the actual tool and back to the model works but feels super tedious.
I don’t know if blender is actually capable of doing it “on the fly”, currently.
As for what hotkeys I don’t currently use: Most of the Polygrouping and Masking.
Polygrouping because I rarely use it in Blender and masking pie menues because I didn’t know about them, to be honest.
My most used workflow and hotkeys consist of the major used tools:
Highest amount of use: Draw, Draw Sharp, Clay Strips, Grab, Smooth and Pinch.
Very often used: Switch active Mesh, Retopo scale (best preview ever) and remesh
Often used: UI for setting different types of falloffs, automasking, going in and out of mirror mode, radius and strength.
Honorable mention: Mask brushes, I promise myself to create a shortcut for, not do it and curse myself or Blender for not having one next time I need it
I didn’t know how to actually create a stick/switchback shortcut either, though. Thanks for showing.
All the rest is then dependent on the type of mesh. If it’s just a rough clay blockout for something I’m going to retopo anyways and might change with my project or mood.
Reference to my type of projects: https://mr_motionblur.artstation.com/
Roughly half of the stuff in there (mostly post 2.8x) is Blender but a lot realtime or texturing and especially most of map baking stuff is still other programs.
(edit) should also mention - even if I use all the shortcuts as described in Vanilla Blender, I also did buy an Addon on BlenderMarket for rapid pie menu access because it is much faster and friendlier than the humungous list Blender currently offers out of the box. AND also offers quick enough access for second-tier tools in a fast-enough fashion for me.
Hm. I’m not sure it actually works. I just excitedly tried it again but it currently doesn’t seem to switch the tool settings, though. For example, when hitting Shift to Stickey-Swap to Smooth, then the tool strength and radius keep reflecting the active tool (like the pen etc).
So it is still necessary to acively swap into the other tool to adjust the strength settings.
Am I doing something wrong or did I misunderstand you there?
I don’t want to go too deep into this discussion because it’s kinda off topic. I showed a custom setup to highlight that there is a lot of room for customizing. But I also wouldn’t want to put holding keys into the default keymap more than it already is.
Just to clarify: While holding Shift it doesn’t actually switch the tool/brush. It just udner the hood uses the smooth brush. That’s why the UI doesn’t change. I’ll see what can be done about that.
I experimented with this for a while too. this setup leads to a lot of accidental clicking though.
It becomes quite frustrating at some point, so it’s better to leave it at Alt MMB imo.
For better discoverability this needs to be mentioned in tutorials and the header menu.
It’s already in the documentation as a start.
The solution I had configured is:
MMB+Click Drag to Rotate View
MMB+Click for Center View to Mouse
By the way, FreeCAD has navigation style named “Blender”, which behaves exactly like this)
When tried, I didnt succeed to replicate such behaviour in Blender though.
I think it doesnot fit the defaults really well, because require quite precise motorics to avoid accidental clicks, but it is nice to have the ability to set it up like that.
Speaking of a trackball (mentioned in the documentation link), there was an idea discussion to enhance turntable to bring trackball flexibility with a better rolling solution while keeping turntable advantages such as clarity.
A link if is interesting:
Throwing a suggestion out there and maybe it was already discussed, but since X is switching colors, wouldn’t it be intuitive if on additive/subtractive brushes X changed the mode from - to + and vice versa? So that you could flip it and work without constantly pressing Ctrl, would be nice
I’ve tried the keymap and I like everything but I would change one thing.
Alt E for stroke method isn’t intuitive, as everything else related to E is face sets. Instead, I would move it to Alt W, or just W, and make Alt E ‘Draw Face Sets’ brush in Sculpt mode, which is very handy
But I’m still considering to revert the Face Set shortcut changes. That would lead to less broken muscle memory among those who use them a lot.
The only shortcut that must be updated is the Face Set pie menu on W to Alt W.
This intentionally leaves W empty. People can assign a shortcut for the Draw Face Sets brush or any other brush/tool if they like.
We usually test keymaps in months (and sometimes years in case of a wide range workflow design) to make sure it follow relevancy mapping.
Not sure I can be helpful much here, we haven’t had much sculpting work recently.
Maybe the “Tab” key could be released to use it as a function key like Shift, Ctrl or Alt so that we would have Tab + Ctrl for circular mode change menu and any combination with this key.
I also think that viewport rolling is a basic action which is massively missing across the entire application defaults, which is strange, taking into accont 2d/2.5d (canvas-like viewport projection-dependent) workflows extentions like greace pencil drawing, texture painting and sculpting where it is especially beneficial.
That’s true! It’s already possible to add it in the keymap for the 3D Viewport. But it only works well with trackball navigation. Would be great to work on that too!
I was never sure about the point of all those freeing keymap activity (especially under consistency flag), because flexible customization makes application extremely personal, at our production level we prefer a single but proprely though out solution instead.
We usually give a month to a new employers to retrain motorics to our studio keymap, which was designed in decades. As it turned out, it is the only viable strategy during our production type.
For example, in object mode freeing keys deity brought a certain amount of damage for no reason, so several worflow cycles remain opened till today.
However, effectiveness of a sculpting mode is not that critically affected by keymap as object mode or edit mode, so I guess it could be okay.
Slightly weird question but how do we integrate this keymap if we already have some custom hotkeys set? Do we have to go in and change the keys manually to match the new keymap?
