Custom Toolbar aka User Libraries - Automatic Mode switching
(pasted from my greasepencil comment)
Everything about his is wrong. Because there is already an addon (often being sold) should have no impact whether something is implemented into Blender.
People have been asking for automatic mode switching for decades. Because there are addons that do this demonstrates the need. When the custom User Library was being developed, most people assumed it would function as a "build your own toolbar" that could remain on the screen and selecting from the User Library would select that brush and change to the correct mode if needed.
People may not use Blender the same way you do. They might add a cube, subdivide it, smooth it, sculpt it, use proportional editing to pull vertices and faces, paint faces. Manual mode switching back and forth to do these tasks reduces efficiency and creativity.
I do not want to spend half of my time on a drawing finding modes in menus. Each time requires 3 clicks at a minimum. For example I need to select Sculpt mode, then click Brush from the toolbar, then select Clay brush from the library bar. Much more efficient if there was a Clay brush on my custom brush library and with 1 click it would activate Sculpt mode and the Clay brush.
I might have different custom User Libraries for 2D Grease Pencil drawings and 3D modelling and Texture Painting and perhaps a mix.
Note I refer to brushes be available in the User Library even if I am in another mode.
It seems the Blender dev team had the inkling of an idea, but the implementation of the idea is clunky and this pinned User Library of brushes and mode switching addition would make it exponentially more useful.
1 Comment
This message might have made sense in its original context, but it doesn’t provide enough clarity to stand on its own as a feature proposal. And the terms "custom toolbar" and "user libraries" AFAIK don't officially exist and are ambiguous and could refer to different concepts in Blender’s interface. Referring to specific features with consistency, and by their official names whenever possible, like the toolbar, asset shelf, asset libraries, would help strengthen your feature proposal, make it clearer and easier to understand and discuss about, and hopefully adopted by the devs. :)
Here are some potentially relevant references from the Blender manual that might align with your idea:
How I understand it, you're referring to the asset shelf, which displays assets, some of which being brush assets. And you suggest allowing users to view and select brush assets across interaction modes and let Blender switch to the appropriate modes and tools automatically when selecting a brush, hoping to get a smoother workflow.
Having a "let me click the brush asset and use it immediately" feature sounds nice to me and is already halfway there with the different tools within an interaction mode (see mesh sculpt mode).
But I think it would help to clarify how the GUI/UX would be impacted. I.E., would it show all brushes across modes (sculpt, texture/vertex paint, etc) or only those relevant to the selected object type? How would it handle brushes shared across modes without complicating the interface (which is the point of interaction modes to begin with)?
You might make it easier for the user to switch to different tools across modes, but it might also make it harder and confusing to learn how interaction modes work for new users, how to avoid that?