Draw, Paint & Sculpting Keymap Proposal - Feedback Request

True my correction, Ctrl+R is Remesh so my bad.

Shift+R is currently assigned to Repeat Last, and Repeat last doesn’t take into account “Repeat last brush stroke” or any command in the viewport of Sculpt Mode. I provided a RCS link to further elaborate the benefit of this suggestion as a default feature. It is incredibly simple, but incredibly powerful at the very same instance. Have you considered it beyond your reply on its usefulness?

Question: Is Blender engineered in such a way, that each tabbed “Mode” can have its own set of independent shortcuts (except fundamental uses move, rotate, scale, repeat last) that don’t cross outside of each mode (Layout/Modeling/Sculpting/UVEditing/) etc. - Basically making a mode that’s user active, only those shortcuts/keybinds remain in that active “mode” state.

IMO that would be a major benefit and long-term headache engineers would have when working with Blender. Because at the very least, each user can customize Blender to function in the ideal fashion as they’d expect.

Something like “Repeat Last Stroke” is not supported at the moment and would be a new feature. That’s beyond this proposal. But it would be possible to add support for this if the shortcut Shift R remains free.

And yes, each editor, mode and tool can have its own keymap entries which allows inheritance of shortcuts.
How keymap entries will be set up needs to be discussed, because some shortcuts are always inherited from 3D View to all its modes,
like Move on G or Click & Drag, Circle Select on C and Bend on Shift W.
That’s not ideal.

Tools that work in multiple modes should absolutely be identical, and ideally there should be a way for the user to universally decide on a single hotkey that is inherited…
they shouldn’t need to assign M for Move in 9 different preference categories, plus toolbars.

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Some of this will be a future topic of improving the keymap editor.
One possible solution that is currently hard-coded in some areas is to ‘link’ keymap entries (similar to collections in the outliner).
That way keymap entries can be defined once and instanced across the keymap wherever they are needed.

But lets focus for now on the preferred keymap behavior instead of the implementation.

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Just one request, can the mask expand and face set expand gestures be exposed as tools in the interface too? it is always really hard to work just with shortcuts with these

I think these 4 operators:

image

Should be edit mode only. Most of them don’t really do anything when used on single object and when used on multiple objects they are very unpredictable anyway (since they operate on origins). That will stop them from bleeding into sculpt mode too.

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It looks like shortcut for Stroke Method is different in Texture Paint mode (that is still E instead of Alt E).
Except that little detail, I think that consistency between modes of this keymap configuration is well done.

I like E dedicated to Face Sets. That is working smoothly.

But I am not convinced by shortcuts using R.
That is an accumulation of conflicts and an aggravation of confusion.
There is conflict between R for resolution or rotation.
Shift R for repeat or remesh.
And a new one was created with Ctrl R for Multires levels or Dyntopo Flood Fill.
That is problematic because for dyntopo modes that don’t support Detail Flood Fill operation ; Ctrl R is adding a Multires modifier.
I would prefer to use Ctrl D for Dyntopo Flood Fill to avoid confusion and use Shift W instead of R and Ctrl W instead of Ctrl R.
That would let space for R for rotate, shift R for repeat last and Ctrl R for Remesh.

One goal of revamp is to solve G,R,S conflict. Currently, it is not.
There are 3 possibilities :

  • Sculpt mode keymap should reuse G,R,S as the other modes.
  • G,R,S should be removed from Global section of 3D View and be reintroduced per mode, to allow to assign those keys to other stuff in Sculpt mode.
  • G and S or G or S should be remapped to Transform active tools activation.

Called by shortcuts or not, I think that shortcuts for orientation and transform mode would be welcomed for Transform active tools.
Shift RMB to place pivot is really appreciated.

I agree with @omr about Face Set pie menu. It is probably possible to add some Initialize Face Set By or Face Set From operators.
Sculpt menu is too long. I would split it into 3 menus (Sculpt, Gestures, Filters).
I think that some shortcuts to call gestures to add/remove volumes, to apply Surface Smooth/Enhanced Details filters and to rebuild BVH would be welcomed.
Those things are not easy to access, but workflow would gain from a quick one for them.

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Current proposal for the transform tools is to not have shortcuts for them in paint/sculpt mode: ““Keymap entries for Transform operators (Move, Rotate, Scale, Bend, Sphere) need to be prevented from appearing automatically in the sculpting and painting modes once some shortcuts are freed.
Even though they can somewhat function, they aren’t optimized for these modes.””

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They are predictable in Object mode, when you know that they are relative to 3D Cursor placement.

But, indeed, in object mode, they are not supported. That would imply to modify them to make them support selection in Sculpt mode.
It may never happen or be a surprise added in future of development.

But, anyways, these shortcuts are useless for sculpt and paint modes. They should not be global.

I don’t think that is relative to active tools created for the mode.
In that case, using GRS for active tools or not is still a question ?

I could be wrong, but the way I understand it, removing all default brush hotkeys also applies to the transform tools. Some heavily used brushes like grab, mask, smooth can maybe retain default hotkeys, but I don’t think anyone uses the transform tools that heavily in sculpt mode.

They were improved in 3.3, with Elastic mode. They are used.
Maybe, they would be more used, if they were not at the end of toolbar, or if they had shortcuts.
Julien just added one, in this keymap configuration, for pivot placement, that was absent, in official release.
That is a step to make those tools more practical.
Maybe we should make them more accessible, too.

I don’t deny that would be more pertinent to reserve those accessible keys, to tools more used than them.

Do we refuse to consider them, because we refuse to add shortcuts to brushes ?
If we add shortcut to brushes, shouldn’t we add, at least, one shortcut to one Transform Active Tool ?
In that case, do we keep one of those GRS shortcuts as a Transform tool for consistency between modes, are do we use a different shortcut ?

Masking in general and a pie menu for mask operations would be pretty essential I think, so if ‘A’ is used as a selection pie it’d be great to at least have a substitute. Convenient masking and face set operations we have in Zbrush are pretty cool, so having them handy at least via shortcuts/pie menus would be neat.

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I would like to point out, a very important hotkey that is integral to all sculpting applications out on the market. Is the ability to cycle up and down subdivision levels on meshes.

Could we find some level of agreement in unity that Blender should prioritize when in “Sculpt Mode” that an active “Multi-Res Modifier” should prioritize some over level for Hotkey usage for subivision level changing.

For example: An active “mesh” w/ a multi-res modifier
Ctrl+D - Add/Move up in “sculpt” subdivision
Shift+D - Move down in “sculpt” subdivision
(When not in “sculpt mode” these hotkeys should no longer function. Even with the multi-res modifier applied.)

This is something since witnessing Pablo turned Blender into the sculpting power it gained recognition for. I am surprised hasn’t been resolved and is something every-single-sculptor should be asking for.

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I’m personally fine with the hotkeys (pgup/ pgdwn) we have currently, but I’m not married to it either. I’m quite used to shift+D for duplicate though, so that might be confusing across modes. Especially if it’s something that could be used in sculpt mode as well.

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What Julien is calling “selection” is an unmasking.
For the moment, in proposed keymap that is the same A masking menu as in 3.5.
In principle, it will be used the same except that the consequence will be inverted for Grow Selection and Shrink Selection.
Shift A and Shift Alt A are creating a mask by expansion. We can expect that to be inverted and have an automatic Fill Mask as initial step of operator.

That inversion does not really change anything to workflow. User will probably have the ability to invert behaviour and change shortcuts for selection to shortcuts for masking.

So, because we will still be able to create a mask using Shift A and Shift Alt A, do you think a shortcut for mask brush is essential ?

Julien assigned R and Ctrl R to that, almost exactly the way you are describing it.
Nobody seems to be against that addition.
The issue is that he used same keys for other things.
Ctrl R is remeshing in absence of a Multires modifier.
Ctrl R is adding a Multires modifier in Dyntopo mode.

I proposed Ctrl D for Dyntopo Flood Fill, because it was a shortcut freed by removing it from switch to Dyntopo Mode.
But Shift D is used to stabilize tracing annotation.
D is used to draw annotation and Alt D is constraining tracing of annotation.

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Thanks for mentioning this. The proposal was not addressing the Sculpt Mode mask pie menu at all.
But yes there is a bit of an inconsistency between the mask pie menu and the proposed selection pie menus. The Grow/Shrink mask operations could be rearranged to be in the same spots as the other pie menus.

image

This is not quite working as expected right now.
Ctrl R is not supposed to add a multires modifier. It’s only meant to switch to another existing layer if available.

I prefer the proposed bindings on R and Ctrl R because voxel remeshing and dyntopo would perfectly sync up and the number of keybindings would be reduced. Which operation is used depends on if dyntopo is used or not.
R = Change detail size
Ctrl R = Apply detail size on object

But for multires levels it’s a bit of a stretch and not obvious. That might need better shortcuts.
Alt 1 and Alt 2 could work for de-/increasing levels.
They are easy to press and similar to setting the subdiv level on Ctrl 1-6

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OK. Like that, that should work.
So, no GRS for transform active tools. I did not expect the 3 shortcuts to be used, anyways.
I am not sure that would be pertinent to prioritize one transform.
But I think that would be interesting to assign a shortcut for the Transfrom active tool, combining the 3 gizmos.

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These are fixed. Download the keymap config again to try it out.
They are not automatically inherited in the prototype keymaps anymore.
How this should be done in the final keymap needs to be seen.

If users prefer to use the transform operations they need to assign shortcuts themselves.

I fixed this inconsistency.

I changed this in the proposal and in the prototype keymaps:
Alt 1 = Decrease Multires Level
Alt 2 = Increase Multires Level

I’d rather have operations in the pie menu that are done very often. That way they benefit from the quick gesture based use of pie menus.
The initialize operators are better suited for the quick favorites menu for now.

One of the legacy shortcuts are 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 and even alt 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,0 to quickly move between collections, which were layers before. Now it’s probably a burden for most people that don’t use it and sometimes hide all but one collection by mistake when pressing a number

These could be a good candidate to change brushes IMO

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Sorry if it is a bit offtopic, but with all these viewport/editor specific shortcuts it would be nice if could press “?” or something similar to show an overlay with all the active keymap bindings.

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