How to set keyboard shortcuts for custom sculpt brushes?

Support Basics & Interface
1

I can’t believe I have to ask about this on a forum, Blender gets really frustrating sometimes.

I created my own sculpt brushes and I need to assign shortcuts to them. If I go to Preferences -> Input -> 3D view -> Sculpt -> Brush Select, my brushes aren’t listed in the dropdown menu for “Sculpt Tool”. I’ve tried searching for a solution but found nothing. Does anyone know how to do this?

2

You select it by brush number (1 -> 0, Shift+1 -> Shift+0) which are the brushes listed in alphabetical order

Those shortcuts you mention are the brushes in the Sculpt / Sculpt Tool menu

3

How can I assign custom shortcuts though? If I make a new brush called “A” the whole order is screwed up. If I have more than 20 brushes I can’t select anything beyond no.20

4

If I make a new brush called “A” the whole order is screwed up
If you don’t want to change the order just name it appropriately (“zCUSTOM1” etc)

Screen Shot 2016-01-09 at 16.12.16.jpg1316×662 144 KB

If I have more than 20 brushes I can’t select anything beyond no.20
Yes you can. Add another shortcut and set the slot number to 21, 22, 23, 24, 25 etc and set whatever key combo you want


5

Thanks for the answer, you put a lot of effort into it. The solution is also so unnecessarily complicated it just proves how UX unfriendly Blender is, it’s things like this that scare people away.

6

So are you scared away ?

7

I’m not scared away, I’m just frustrated something like this is still not done in a better way. All it takes to do this in ZBrush is Ctrl + Alt + Click and set your shortcut. In Blender, I had to ask about it here after 30 minutes of trying to figure it out myself, something so basic as setting a custom keyboard shortcut. Then I find out I can’t even do it the way I’d like to, a way that makes sense.

I like to support open-source whenever I can and I’d really like to see Blender to be more respected, but if the UX isn’t sorted out it might not ever happen. There’s actually a lot of UI that I like more than what I’ve seen elsewhere, but every now and then something like this comes up and I just can’t wrap my head around how is it not in a much better state. Seems like the development is getting more focused on UX from what I’ve read, so hopefully things will improve anytime soon.

8

I agree 100%. The keyboard shortcut system in blender is super weird. Some examples:

  1. You can have several shortcuts for the same key in the same mode without any kind of a warning. Only one of the shortcuts actually works. Which leads me to the next thing…
  2. You would think that the x button for the shortcut would remove the key bind (making it blank so you can “free” the key to actually bind something useful for that key). However it justs deletes the whole key (command) from the list. Too bad if you needed it. (well, you can Restore, if you don’t mind losing your changed shortcuts).
  3. There’s no easy way to duplicate shortcuts, if you for example need a new key for a certain command (with special parameters).
  4. There seems to be a bug with non standard keyboard layouts where the actual inputs and what gets saved in the keymap differs. Honestly I should probably report this… For example, when I filter for ; or add ; to a key, it gets added as . and vice versa.

I could probably go on but this isn’t very helpful, so. All I hope is that the 2.8 blender workflow release takes a long and hard look at this part of blender. Or maybe everyone is just using the default shortcuts and don’t care. :eek:

ALSO, before I forget, I want to remember this for later: I want to be able to change the hard coded (?) ctrl c ctrl v copy paste value thing. This is actually really nice in blender but I can’t use it because of my keyboard layout.

9

Hi Richard, I know this is old but… How could u know the number of a certain brush in the brush list? Is it really necessary to count the brushes in order to get that number or is there an easier and quicker way to know?.
Also, and even more important. Is there a way of cycling through custom brushes with the brush.active_index_set operator (or if there´s another operator/way of doing it by assigning the brush numbers)?. Cause I found out there’s no way of selecting custom brushes with paint.brush_select, it would only shows the default sculpt tools (it is the only operator I could found that has the toggle function).
Thanks!