That is pretty common to use procedural textures for brushes, too.
I am probably not the only user, using BI textures, to create patterns for tips of brushes.
Nobody will use an image when what is required is a gradient.
We have an adjustable one, with a Blend or Gradient texture used with a Color Ramp.
Probably, several people have brush textures based on Voronoi, Wood, Marble, Musgrave and Clouds textures to have common noises or bands.
White Noise texture is just unusable for brushes.
Distorted Noise is too complicated for a brush tip pattern.
But using another one of BI texture allows to have access to common Perlin, Voronoi or Cell noises.
And mixing an image with a procedural texture is a trick used to modulate its pattern with brush textures, too.
But yes.
- The most intuitive way to create a pattern for a texture artist, is to draw/paint it.
- Sharing of brush textures between apps implies to create packs of brush textures as images.
- For Sculpting, Vector Displacement Maps is a blessing.
No. Texture nodes as a way to create patterns for painting brushes will not be done, through geometry nodes.
More Color nodes as shading ones are expected for that (Invert Color, HSV, Brightness/Contrast…).
And nodes to transform a mesh are not intuitive to transform an image.
Anyways, if a node brush is created ; as I already said, it will have a category of nodes to define its pattern, another one to transform its mapping and another one to define its sampling. So, that would not hurt its development to start by that, and think about having that available for common brushes, too.
You probably should repost on the big thread dedicated to Texture Painting, too.
Because your work will affect Texture Artists, who may not read this thread.
Users of Texture Paint mode have probably more things to say about that, than sculptors.
Initially, when they introduced Geometry Nodes ; all old modifiers should become GN modifiers. They did not do it and continued to improve present ones.
But if developers are deciding to refactor one of them ; that may make sense to rethink it as a nodegroup asset.
If GN cache and GN attributes support are allowing more flexibility, ability to create sculpt layers at different levels of modifier stack ; that worths to think about the nodes, that could be part of a Multires nodegroup, having an intuitive UI.
Some of them could be used in other domains that sculpting, and that would be things totally unknown from Blender users.
They are currently talking about removing current limitation of one Multires modifier per mesh. GN are currently allowing to create the equivalent of a shapekey at any level of modifier stack.
That would not be bad to be able to sculpt, at any level of modifier stack.