Unify and simplify sculpt brushes system - Proposal

blender 2.8 has improved the use of the sculpt thanks to the topbar, but I think that the way to work with the active tools has not been good for the sculpt system that has different needs than the rest of editing modes and areas.

My proposal is this

Main points

Unify Brush system
The main lack of the system is that in reality of all the brushes by default, at the moment of the truth, almost none of those presets of brush is used. For example in my case.

In the left bar are the brushes that I use by default, in the right bar the brushes that I use personalized.

Actually, when you work you only need a couple of base brushes and dozens and dozens of custom brushes. The current way of working of the brushes makes it very difficult to use custom brushes, because you have to select the type of brush and then go to a submenu to decide which brush you need. Doing necessary first to remember the type of brush that is, then go to the menu to change the brush you need. All this makes the task of changing the brush tedious.

I think that what the way to sculpt needs is to unify all the brushes, if brushes internally are different is something that should concern the developers, not the user who should be transparent the system. The user is only interested in having all the brushes at hand when he wants to change brushes.

Make a clear and simple icons for brushes
I think blender2.8 has made it very difficult to recognize brushes due to the use of flat icons, which are practically impossible to identify, even less for new users. For example, I needed to stop at enough icons to know what they meant because it was impossible to identify them by the icon.

Blender must use a thumbnail system like the rest of the programs because it allows to quickly identify any brush. And being complicated to create this type of icon nobody is going to use it in their custom icons, so you must use a simple sphere with a matcap to unify visually and aesthetically all the custom brushes of the users and the brushes by default of the program.

Replace the toolbar (spacebar) with a brushes selector menu
Since none of the spacebar functions make sense within the sculpting mode, you should implement a simple brushes selector menu that allows the user to select any brush they have. Without going into details of implementation on shorcuts, exact size of icons, aesthetics, if it should show the name of the selected brush, … it is very necessary a way to access quickly to the change of brush.

A menu that will automatically grow in size and will automatically arrange the brushes according to the user had loaded or not the number of brushes. Or if this were complicated in implementing that simply the menu would allow from the beginning a great quantity of brushes by default (70 at least). This is the biggest lack of blender at the moment at the time of sculpting and that makes its use very difficult.

5 Likes

I’d forgotten to mention @pablodp606 I’m sure he’s got great ideas about this.

Don’t waste brain power. Zbrush has the best brush system workflow for sculpting, just take a look at it.

You mean we don’t use blender or just copy Zbrush?

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I mean, zbrush is the perfect app to grab inspiration about sculpting brushes workflows.

No point brainstorming from nothing. :wink:

But I agree about the icons for brushes.

Well, in principle I don’t think blender developers like to copy Zbrush, at least so brazenly. And Zbrush isn’t the best example of an interface, if it’s almost one of the worst in UX.

Equally this proposal has similar ideas to those of Zbrush, such as popup to choose brushes, use the same type of thumbnails (which would be appreciated by those who come from zbrush or the industry), unify the brushes … Well in blender2.8 I think it has gone backwards in the way of sculpting.

2 Likes

You know we are crying for months now, to have it back. Up until now, the removal of it was the biggest mistake done in the sculpt brushes workflow, and everyone agrees with it, but still no changes. Sad.

And it’s getting worse each time a change is made there. I guess those changes are coming from people who don’t sculpt very often. This is very concerning.

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Do we had a popup to select brushes when we pulse a hotkey in any part of the screen?

Well, then I appreciate your support to change this situation.

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I meant the way the brush panel used to display all the brushes available at the same time. Now this is impossible for no reason. This basically killed the sculpting workflow in blender,

You can see the complaints without answers here.

Same issue in this thead here:

This is a huge problem.

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Yes, i know, my first proposal to improve sculpt and to add a popup was two-three years ago. Idid the same proposal in june 2018 nd now I do a new proposal with similar concepts.

I dont understand the reason for sculpt workflow changes. Maybe some dev could explain it.

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I don’t think that’s going to happen, ever. Like, it seems like one of the guys also looking for answers there in the devs page, works in the blender studio, and yet no answers, no changes no nothing. If there’s no answer even for someone from the inside, imagine for the rest. :rofl:

This is tough.

You’ve got to be kidding me :flushed: