I know this is out of the scope of the paint mode design discussion, just being curious here.
Are there any planes of letting the user customize the brush icon layout to some extent? (Thinking something like T panel re-arrange and grouping) Which brushes are used can be very much dependent on the job at hand so what works nicely one day might be a tedium the next.
I’d imagine keeping the asset editor open is not everyone’s cup of tea and might not be the most economical thing to do either.
The idea is to use a similar UI and approach as the Pose Library in the sidebar. Those assets can also be sorted and categorised, or even just show your entire global brush library. The question is just if this can land in the toolbar, which first needs to be reworked.
Sounds good, thank you for clarifying.
My first intuition was “oh no, not the n panel” but thinking about I don’t think I’m using it that frequently in sculpt/paint mode anyhow (might just be a personal thing though). One thing that might look odd from a UI point of view is having one form of brush menu on the left, and another one on the right.
I guess if the grid layout can be tweaked and if it allows for custom sorting as well as having a convenient way accessing grouped brushes (when clicking on a group of brushes the subset could appear as a popover instead of having to choose them from a dropdown list) this could work nicely.
I think that the colour picker/ materials should also be in a separate panel. At least for Grease Pencil, there’s no proper way to dedicate a portion of the UI to a colour picker and brush settings independently (neither from the N-panel, nor from the properties). That basically killed the workflow for me already.
I guess a color picker/swatches/palettes workflow could be a whole chapter to think about. I’d really like the ability to set the sample radius of the picker, as well as the sample space, or the ability to sample from outside the Blender window.
Not to mention, different colour spaces, wheel types (see: Pigment.O plugin - Plugins - Krita Artists for reference). And an artistic colour picker in which you can limit the gamut and the like (see: Artistic Color Selector Docker — Krita Manual 5.0.0 documentation).
I have been noticing a trend with some of the new paint brushes - modes are selected from a drop down instead of a preset from a brush manager that already exists.
This ultimately, though it’s a powerful brush, as a UX it’s not that efficient when using many modes and mode settings. The more complex the mode, the more slow it would be to toggle different mode settings - and quickly toggling these brushes with addons or top-level GUI exposure for custom workflows (or event with an expected UX from the the default brush manager) would be tricky to implement too - meaning I can’t expose a dynamic list of the brush presets with the different modes to a top level or pie menu with various modes and settings build in - nor expose multiple versions of the brush mode types dynamically, etc.
These brushes are one brush per one preset, to toggle is to change mode and settings repeatedly over and over.
With texture painting, these types of modes would be excellent as individual brushes, or have a method that can allow a developer or user to expose these brush presets per mode dynamically.
Color and Brush Settings are 2 different panels for grease pencil brushes.
It is possible to dedicate an area of a workspace to Color panel of brushes that are using Color Attributes.
But panel display or properties view’s alignment on it, will be lost at the moment an active tool, that does not have a color panel, is used.
That is not possible for brushes linked to a material.
So, what you are asking for is not really a separated panel, but rather a dedicated editor.
No. There is only one new paint brush tool. It does not have modes other than blending modes.
Your screen capture is referring to mesh filters. They will be absent of paint mode.
Pablo created new modes, mainly for new sculpt brushes and some for older sculpt brushes.
And there is no problem with Sculpt Brushes. Different modes settings can be saved as brushes.
Your remark is pertinent only for color filters.
Currently, you can have a direct access to a color filter by creating a shortcut dedicated to it.
Except Fill filter, Color Filters only have 1 setting.
Strength that should be manageable through Shift F shortcut. (but currently, it does not work)
So, basically, when you enable color filter tool, the only thing that you have to set is Filter Type.
It does not seem valuable to modify color filters UI.
A strength palette, similar to weight palette from Paint Palettes addon, would do the job to quickly set strength of filter to a custom value.
If there was an intent to make more complicated color filters, that would make sense to rethink color filters UI, in a way that would also benefit mesh filters in sculpt mode.
But if there is none, improving UX for mesh filters and cloth filters is a Sculpt mode task, out of scope.
I am indeed asking for a dedicated editor, so I can have a consistent UI when changing modes. You will often change object/ edit/ sculpt/ paint (draw) modes. Doing so will make it so that the UI is all over the place and this is quite tiresome to the eyes. Moreover, it also makes it that the panels jump, so I may need to scroll back down to see my material list again when I switched to a tool that doesn’t make use of the material list (basically any non-GP tool). For painting and grease pencil, I would like several subpanels to be dedicated editors — you know, like 2D Graphical design software also maintains a consistent UI throughout tools.
That would probably be a lot more ergonomic, than our multiple color pickers, in multiple panels or pop-ups, always at a different place.
But the implication of that goes beyond a paint mode.
We are using color pickers, everywhere : for brushes, shading nodes, compositing nodes, grease pencil, etc…
As soon as a color picker editor attempt will be started, testers will ask to make it work for everything.
Ok, maybe I should be more specific… that particular color filter brush in the sculpt paint mode or future paint filter modes should be brush presets instead of only a drop down. Then later they could also be saved as assets.
In general, for the future asset browser, saving brush assets like brush presets will be important for a rich painting UX.
Any ideia of release date?
Nothing yet. There is active development by one dev, but the project will get properly picked up next year.
Until then we’ll keep it as an experimental feature in the Alpha versions 
Maybe is just me, but it’s very sad the way the ‘CEOS’ (or whatever the right name is) of Blender decide to support sculpting and vertex painting, just ‘one guy’ and whatever.
It’s not a real complaining about all Blender itself, but I just don’t understand why they just ignore it, when more ‘focus’ on it will turn blender into a more visible and commercial solution for companies and free more people from the ‘industry standard Windows machine because most people are obliged to use ZBrush for sculpting and vertex painting’.
Even after years of the ‘sculpting’ implementation there is no ‘layer’ support and so on.
This decision also makes game development became more expensive, considering a better sculpting and vertex painting will make more people look for linux machines, most of the cases for pricing, but in some years we may have more games and then other kinds of support.
That’s sad and frustrating in so many ways. Ç.Ç
I’m sorry for the wait. The unfortunate truth is that Blender has a relatively small team for such a huge software. There are endless things to work on, even just for sculpting and painting.
The decision to have one person prioritise on texture painting is actually a good thing.
Because of this, texture painting will no longer get left behind but instead make progress in the next months until more devs can join the project.
In the meantime we focus on improving brush management by supporting brush assets.
This will make many modes and workflows easier to use and fix many other long lasting issues.
Afterall the development doesn’t stagnate. Everyone is constantly making the software better 
Also see the bright side with texture painting getting an overhaul we could attract new people who want to contribute and maybe lessen the burden the current team have.
Also there are a lot of features who could be added to the sculpting workflow btu don’t really make sense if you don’t have a good way to manage brushes.
One thing that I dream of having in any 3D painting software: a visual color palette that resembles a painting palette. A small part of the viewport in which I can paint and store my colors, mix colors as if they were actual paint, add tones and mix them, maybe organize them in small round areas with a clean interface. That would be so intuitive and helpful. Blender is all about being user friendly and artistic, that would fit beautifully in it.
I understand the problems that free / open source software have during the development process, specially with money, team and etc, people get in / out, use their free time and etc.
I also agree with you and warcanin, “one hand typing the code is better than none”, but my complain was (and probably will always be) how priorities are taken with free / open source software.
For example, when sculpting was introduced, more people start to use blender to sculpt in youtube channels and today we even have focused tutorials on hard surface and organic modeling, but the point is how long it takes to happen and how useful blender sculpting reali is in a day by day usage for non 3D animation workflow?
When we talk about 3D animation workflows like 3D movies or VFX. Next Gen and RRR are perfect examples of how powerful and ready for professional works blender is. And offcourse blender projects like the beaultifull and wonderful ‘Sprite Fright’ (I really love this one) or the wonderful Sintel drama.
When sculpting was introduced, devs / CEO’s should have been noticed that a vertex painting upgrade was necessary and put some effort on it (IMO), so a 1 by 1 update along the sculpting / painting over the years should have been done instead of ‘years later’ we start to do something.
Give more support to some features, will introduce blender to the game development market, things like layers in sculpting mode, delete lower and a better vertex painting will make blender be attractive and this mean more money to the project. And just to make thing clear, I’m not saying in any moment something out of sense like ‘turn Blender into Zbrush’, this is unreal and non-sense, I’m aware of this.
A good example of ‘good choices’ from devs is GODOT game engine, not sure if this will be in the final 4.0 release (it’s in beta now), but they decided to add .blend file support to the engine, this means NONE or at least, less FBX import / export, they noticed the potential of this kinda of support and they are trying to use it.
In a near future when GODOT 3D become more visible, the engine will also make Blender more visible due to the .blend support, and MAYBE make even Linux itself became more attractive considering it’s a cross platform engine and companies can save tons of money on software licensing, maybe some of this money can be redirect to blender.
More people sculpting and painting with blender, means more visibility and marketing to them and more money / people on the project. Specially considering that not in future, materials / shaders will became procedurals instead of the regular image system that we have today.
So my complain in the end is: sometimes they choose the wrong turn, IMO CEO’s should start to adopt a strategy to ‘spread’ Blender into other development sections, like gaming and etc, not a so linear animation pipeline.
Sadly I’m too dumb to learn programing so my help and effort will be develop a game using Linux and Blender and give credits and some donation to it.
And off course, all my love and TYVM for everyone in the Blender team, even not agreeing with some decisions Blender is lovable and awesome, so TY all S2.
I’m very excited and anxious for the new features in painting.
Also TYVM for all the replies.
The paid blender coders are all very busy. All with stuff that is essential for blenders adoption some way or another. There’s just so much you can do with the amount of revenue an open source project can generate. It’s a pity that your preference of priorities doesn’t match those of the blender foundation but there’s not much to be done about that. It’s not that the stuff the BF-hired coders do doesn’t need to be done as well. Since BF is tightly linked to the studio and the studio produces movies, it’s to be expected the main focus will always be on stuff needed for movies. That might not be ideal for people wanting to use blender as a game-asset modeler, but still I think the model works better than most open source projects , that don’t have such a rigorous eat-your-own-dogfood testing system in place. I think the main reason blender has come as far is it has is the open movies driving the development.
So while I can understand your frustration, I don’t think it’s fair to call it a ‘complaint’. It’s just the way it is.
My primary use for Blender is modeling, UV, animation, and texturing game assets for videos games. I know im a bit oldschool, but my texturing does not involve PBR as my assets are all handpainted, althought I do use baked normal maps to assist my texturing process. I’ve been using Blender since Radiosity was the way to render pathtracing and I cant remember that version. Blender has come a long long way and it is very impressive what has been done. Like most 3d artists, my workflow involves bouncing between 3 or more different applications to get a completed asset. As Blender expands its capabilities, I slowly reduce that number as something that was once achieved in one application is now possible in Blender. For what I do, There’s not much Blender cant do, but I will say one thing I’ve always liked to see improve is the area of texture painting. For skyboxes, I must use Blender because there’s is nothing else out there that allows me to get the job done faster and better. For models, I still use 3dcoat. So, I’ll give you the dealbreakers that keep me in 3dcoat, for now!
Brush projection algorithm. in 3dcoat, you can have a very large brush that is larger that the bounds of the mesh you are painting on and when you do a brush stroke, the stroke is somehow “wrapped” around the mesh and projected onto the texture cleanly without any hard lines. In Blender, of you go over and edge you will get hard lines on the texture where the stroke went over the edge of the mesh. To get around this, you simply have to either keep hitting undo or paint out the edges which is very time consuming when you are painting a texture by hand. This is also very limiting of the types of brush strokes you can do as an artist.
A Layer system. In digital painting of any type, not just 3d, having the ability to quickly add layers and blend them not only speeds up your workflow immensly, but allows you to keep areas of the texture separated for things like, clothing or variations on hair or skin or decals, etc… In 3dcoat I can add layers and then open them up in photoshop and use all my PS tools and processing there and jump right back into the app. Blender does allow you to edit in Photoshop like this as well, so If Blender implements layers, I imagine it would be fairly simple to have those layers stored in a format that photoshop, Krita, etc… could read. Layers are slow important for making changes involving blend modes as well. To paint using Multiply in Blender, you would set the Brush to this mode, which means ever stroke is destructive. If this were and separate layer, you can mask out areas that may be too dark or not the right color, etc…
Shift to Blend. This is more of a “Nice to have” but, in 3dcoat (and in Blender’s sculpt mode), holding the shift key allows you to blend the colors under the brush. It would be cool if holding the shift key would allow you to blend or blur. At least, have it as an option that can be enabled. On a side note… 3dcoat and blender share the issue of having a very weak blur tool. Substance Painter actually has a brush called “Blur” that is very strong and much closer to Photoshop. I found Substance Painter to be very unfriendly to handpainting workflows though. Of course, that is for PBR mainly so this makes sense.