Sculpting brushes shortcuts in Blender 4.3
The changes to the hotkeys are not great. Previously, switching between brushes only needed one key press. This was efficient and made for a streamlined workflow. Now, if you want to change brushes, you have to either click on the correct icon in new bottom panel, completely messing up muscle memory built throughout the years, or press shift + space and type the name of the brush manually (which by the way is broken for the users that opted to use the suggested shift + space shortcut for animation playback).
I can't see how this makes our lives easier. If anything it's quite the opposite. Work is slower and more tedious.
I think new funcionality shouldn't replace the older estaslished way to do things. Changes should make working on Blender better, not more difficult and cumbersome. The old shortcuts for the sculpting brushes should be brought back.
3 Comments
This has been a quietly growing problem over the past few years that is not going in a good direction at all.
A lot of the subtle 'weird' aspects of blender's UI & workflow are what make it very fast to use and then they go do something like this.
Blender new UI for brushes make the application more flexible, since it's possible to add more brushes to a library, instead of wait for a new UI update or try to remember in which brush there is a custom copy of the brush.
Sometimes a code change it's something small and sometimes it's not, since sculpting has been reworked 4.3, some things cannot stay the same because the old code has been modified, deleted or something else.
In this case, manually change a shortcut to get a more flexible workflow it's not a big deal, considering the gain of performance and etc.
In my opinion, Blender should work on more "custom interface changes", like the ability to drag and drop a brush from the library and place it in a side bar, like ZBrush does or make the library interface customizable, like rearrange the brush order, create custom groups, attach to other areas of the view port like top, right, left.
And off course, let the user create a panel with their fav brushes and set a shortcut to it, like space-bar.
This kinda of change is better because makes the application more flexible, not only because user can modify the UI, but because users can adjust Blender to fit to their workflow instead being forced to adapt to the Blender workflow.
Those keybindings were removed so you can set your own brushes with your own shortcuts. I agree that this is a tradeoff, but IMO its necessary if you consider that there will be a time where many brushes will be available on Extensions platform and the shortcuts will overlap. What we need is better shortcut editor.