The previous article on Brushes & Drafting went into the basics of how brush assets will work and where they’ll be stored. Now we’ll delve into how brushes will be accessed, tweaked and authored.
Asset ShelfThis will be the new region to immediately access any available asset. The slim horizontal space at the button is ideal for visualizing enough brushes and catalogs for any given task.
A mockup of the asset shelf next to other UI elements in Sculpt Mode
And just like any other region:
The size of the assets can be dynamic to only take up necessary spaceAs the name implies, this region would potentially be used for any assets in any editor. Poses, Nodes, Objects, Materials, Textures and more can eventually be used from here.
This will also respect valuable space in the toolbar and sidebar for tools, properties and add-ons. Meanwhile, the Asset Browser will remain the editor to organize and browse any & all assets.
Tools vs BrushesA key improvement is to make the relationship between tools and brushes in the UI clear and more accessible. This is accomplished by directly displaying and assigning shortcuts to brushes, instead of doing this via tools in the toolbar.
For context, until now the user technically doesn’t pick brushes. Instead they pick “Tools”, either in the Toolbar or via shortcuts. “Brushes” are instead saved presets of the tool settings. This way you can have multiple variations of a single tool.
Brushes are presets of a ToolUnfortunately this makes it very hard to access brushes. Also, categorizing and sorting them in this predefined way quickly becomes counter intuitive when creating & using a lot of them.
Each Tool can have any number of Brushes. Which brush is where is hard to tell. Many Tools will only have a single brush.Brushes will be put into the forefront again. All tools in a mode that contain brushes will be merged and the type of brush will instead become a brush setting, just like any other.
Brushes will then be accessed directly in a “global palette” via the Asset Shelf or via shortcuts.
Only What You NeedProper scalability of the Asset Shelf will make it intuitive to access any brush among potentially hundreds of them. This can be achieved with 3 ways:
Compact DisplayThe goal is to comfortably show up to 30 brushes on screen at a time and intuitively navigate to see more. This way most screen space is still available and the brush thumbnails will remain readable.
Sculpt Mode for mesh objects alone will have up to 80 brush assets shipped with Blender. This will ensure that all commonly necessary brushes are available by default. On top of that it’s easy to see how the amount will skyrocket with user created assets and shared assets. But even with this huge library of brushes, it’s not needed to see all at once.
Quickly searching for a specific brush via typing is also important functionality and will be available from the Asset Shelf directly.
Custom CatalogsSorting & categorizing brushes will be done with Asset Catalogs. By cataloging brushes the user can define which set of brushes to display at a time.
Any type of brush asset can be sorted into a custom made catalogTo make this even more customization there will be “Dynamic Catalogs” as well. These catalogs essentially act as “smart filters”, so brushes can appear in multiple catalogs at once. For example any brush that is tagged as “Favorite” will appear in the dynamic catalog called “Favorites”, no matter what other catalog they belong to.
Brushes can be tagged to show up in any dynamic catalogTo make sure all brushes are still at your fingertips, the Asset Shelf needs to be able to comfortably show up to 12 catalogs at a time.
Explicit & Implicit FilteringYou should only ever see what you need. This will be accomplished by:
Editing your BrushesA Brush Asset has a certain life cycle. It is created from an existing brush asset, is used, tweaked and drafted along the way, and eventually saved as a new Asset that can be shared with others.
Each of these steps need to be at your finger tips, without getting in the way of others. Drafting will be the key to editing your assets for both daily use and asset authoring.
The three stages of a brush asset life cycle.Using brushes must be straightforward with a clean user interface. In the long-term the tool settings will only show “cherry-picked” brush settings, to expose only what is actually needed.
Drafting, as in extensively editing a brush, is expected to happen regularly and deliberately. The full expanse of brush settings will be quickly available in the sidebar and any changes can be saved to the asset as a draft.
Authoring can be compared to publishing. It’s when you package your asset for further reuse and sharing. This is done in the asset browser, in the asset library .blend to finalize Assets for others to enjoy.
Next StepsThe first target is to apply this design on the Pose Library, to properly test its usability and user interface. The Asset Shelf design will evolve further from there. Brush Assets will come after, starting with the Curve Sculpt Mode brushes.