The bigger question should be why Blender even has an Options menu when it should just be a button in the middle section that can be toggled on and off like Snap and Proportional Editing. Saw someone else making that suggestion and it makes much more sense to me. It’s just too far off to the right side of the window to notice as well.
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Yes, it seems like a crazy decision that makes no sense. A really important feature that people have been asking for for years gets added(to the right place, the pivot menu) and then gets removed and placed in a weird dropdown that doesn’t even need to exist? Strange decision.
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Pablo made a patch about adding a mirror symmetry feature that is not tied to having Dyntopo activated:
https://developer.blender.org/D6180
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When first implemented it was a global setting but since moving the origins doesn’t make sense in Edit Mode the Devs moved it to the Options dropdown, but most of us agree on having it as a separate pop-over, I think Devs concer is the UI jump or something in those lines.
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It’s my 3dsMax pivot point brain. Editing the pivot(origin) was one of the first things I looked for coming from Max. It’s very important for me working on modular game asset design. I have a script in Max that I hit a hotkey and pivot(origin) is set to selected vert/edge/face/object/or centre of selection, so edit mode makes more sense for me for precise vertex pivot placement. Thankfully, Maxivz’s Interactive tools addon gives me this exact same functionality.
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Back on topic. I’ve really been trying to get into Sculpt Mode, but I’m finding it very uncomfortable working with it when I’m so used to Zbrush brushes. It seems that no matter what settings/falloff I try on brushes they just feel so unnatural to work with in comparison with ZB, especially Grab and the Clay brushes. I just signed up to the cloud to watch the new series by Julien Kaspar and set up my brushes using his advice, but they still feel so inferior compared to ZB(highly subjective, of course, but it’s my feeling)
Does anyone with ZB experience have any advice/experiences to share in trying to approximate the feel of the ZB brushes.
Which ones do you want specifically? There are a lot of brushes in ZBrush, so your favourite ones would be a good start.
The basics: Clay and Grab. Snakehook seems decent in Blender and the Elastic Deform also. Also, with Clay Strips, where do I find the square alpha it seems to be using? The texture swatch is just blank. Or is the squareness just controlled by the falloff? Thanks.
You mean the Move brush right? Don’t recall a brush named Grab. 
I’m talking about the Blender brushes. 
To me, ZB move=grab, clay=clay, clay buildup/tubes=clay strips
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Ah, got it. Was asking about what brushes from ZBrush you wanted, but I guess you want the effects of Clay and Move brushes from ZBrush, right?
Yes. 
The Grab brush has a weird feeling and is more like Zbrush Move Elastic than Move.
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It’s hardcoded.
Either way, I gave up on trying to approximate the blender brushes to zbrush, they are just too different in feeling no matter what.
Pity. Without a decent brush engine I just can’t see myself wanting to use it. Probably not an issue at all for those whose brains haven’t been hardcoded by Zbrush, but the difference in the Clay engines seems to be huge.
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I did a couple of tries with the Grab brush in Blender and compared it to Move in ZBrush. I think they behave fairly similarly by just increasing the Strength and change the Normal Weight some in the Brush menu with some experimentation.
As for the Clay brush, when taking a look at how it works in ZBrush, the closest I could find in Blender is strangely enough the Flatten brush (try the brushes with or without Accumulate if you like to have that on your brush, which works the same as in ZBrush). Just change the brush default setting to negative, the Plane Offset setting to 10-20 cm, Fallof set to Smooth, and play with the Strength setting. You will get a decent enough replicate of the ZBrush Clay brush on a positive setting. However, the downside to this is that the inverse setting for Flatten creates a sharpening effect, so carving stuff out will not work the same. You could just make a new brush and just make the Plane Offset have a negative value for the inverse effects, but that’s still just extra work to add.
You could try asking Pablo if he could make a new brush with the settings above, but with a better positive and negative setting to replicate the ZBrush Clay brush. Shouldn’t be too hard when the settings I used aren’t that complicated.
You can change the brush shape by adding a square or circle alpha for instance, btw.
Hope that helps! 
Just give it a shot. It feels weird at first, but after several tries, things become workable.
The UI/UX is terrible though, specially if you have a lot of custom brushes, but that’s another story. 
See, this is one of the main problems, negative has no effect on Flatten/Scrape, which means they can never behave like other Zbrush clay brushes like the Trim and Polish. Then there is a separate brush for fill… making 2 versions of the same brush just to go from add to sub isn’t an option. 
The power of the Zbrush Clay-based brushes is that the Clay engine is an entirely custom made behaviour that is 100% designed to mimic real-world clay. It’s very hard to describe the difference, but Blender’s brushes just don’t compare, really. They don’t feel like they’re part of a system at all. Thanks for the tips, though.
Workable is one thing. Good enough to ignore the Zbrush icon on my start bar…
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Not directly related to the pivot UI issue, but to Sculpt Mode UI in general: I’m currently exploring the Blender Atelier: Sculpt add-on for a BlenderNation review (Cubebrush link, Blender Market link). It provides an impressively comprehensive expansion of the Sculpt Mode tools, and includes customizable Sculpt Mode UI elements. Here’s the manual if you want to check out the features.
I’m using Originie, by @kkar. Offers lots of pivot auto-placement options.
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Is there anything we can do with masking shortcuts? Ctrl/alt is used for brush so you have to switch tools all the time to mask then back to your sculpt brush. It should just be a click and hold and then auto switch back to the brush when you let go. I dont remember how other programs do it but i think zb is more like that. Maybe same thing for extrude outwards and creating panels etc. Speed is missing in this regard.
Just wondering if theres some ideas on this front or if im not understanding.