Improving Brush Presets Panel
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I was importing some new brush sets I had purchased and found the brush preset panel section a little difficult to navigate and understand. I think the issue for me is more aesthetics and making it easier to understand what is going on. It took me a while to figure out there were settings I could turn on to display by grouping/add new groups, rename, etc.
I had written in an email to @VectorStyler asking if there was currently a way to stack the sets of brushes opened one set under another in the brushes panel. Each one seemed to open by default in a new tab entirely. The default brushes section did not appear to have a way to roll up. He wrote back, "The only way to have brushes in the same place is to import them into a common brush preset.
And for better organization, it is possible to create preset groups."This got me searching for how to access these existing features and from what I saw in the manual, it was not easy to figure out.
After some determined exploration, I began to figure it out - but I thought this topic overall should be a dedicated thread about brushes and organization that I could add to over time as new questions come up.
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Showing the grouping options are off by default. I was unaware these groupings existed. In my humble opinion, it would make sense to have these be on by default so a new user can see they are there and then decide to uncheck them as desired.
Would it make sense to have the default brushes that come with VS in a default folder?
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I figured out I needed to append brushes in order to add them to the main section of brushes as opposed to just opening them in an independent panel - that is totally fine and I like having the option to do it either way. Not every brush set would I want appended to the main set so having that ability to join or not is great.
Once I appended the brushes I wanted to the main set of brush presets, I wanted to create new subfolders for them to go into. It was confusing at first to know when I was naming a group compared to a description of the group. I got that wrong a few times and had to fix it later.
I was able to create folders and put the default brushes in one and named it and then made new folders for other brushes I appended. I noticed I could not select multiple brushes and move them as a unit into a folder. Dragging them one by one and hovering overtop the main folder to drop them in did not highlight that folder to acknowledge it was targeted. and the arrow representing content inside did not rotate to a vertical position when clicking to look inside new group folders. here is a video of the inability to add multiple brush files at one time to a folder.
Here is an example where the triangle does not rotate and the visuals are a little rough opening a folder to see the contents
These are little things, but would help with UX
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The brush shape selector in the contextual menu panel at the top seems to list all the brush presets - but it does not divide them up. The list could also potentially become very long the more brushes you add to the brush preset panel.
Could we add a star or a circle that could be selected in the brush preset panel next to each brush there so we could pick and choose what brush presets are displayed in the contextual panel menu for easy custom access?
Maybe like this? where you can choose the highlight a small circle?
Maybe even allow for a categorization by highlighted brush?
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@Boldline said in Improving Brush Presets Panel:
The brush shape selector in the contextual menu panel at the top seems to list all the brush presets - but it does not divide them up. The list could also potentially become very long the more brushes you add to the brush preset panel.
Yes, this can be a problem. I will try to improve these panels.
