Blender add-on · version 1.0.0

The brush toolbar Blender took away in 4.3, rebuilt.

A persistent vertical bar of real brush thumbnails for Sculpt and Paint modes — with pinned favorites, a favorites-only mode and keyboard slots. Not a popup you summon and lose: a toolbar that stays on screen, where brushes used to live.

  • 4.3 → 5.2 supported
  • 48 automated tests
  • 4 Blender versions tested
  • GPL-3.0-or-later
  • Pure Python, offline
Vertical Brush Bar showing favorites and a full grid of brush thumbnails while sculpting.
Every brush, one click away. Real thumbnails, favorites pinned on top — no shelf, no digging.

See it in action

A twenty-second walkthrough

One click swaps the active brush, keyboard slots jump between favorites without leaving the model, and favorites-only folds the full library away. Twenty seconds, start to finish.

Why it exists

A workflow regression that never got fixed upstream

Blender 4.3 replaced the vertical brush toolbar with the horizontal asset shelf. Sculptors lost the muscle memory built over years, and brush switching — something done constantly — started costing extra clicks.

The asset shelf is horizontal and sits at the bottom of the viewport. Existing add-ons answer with radial menus and popups — temporary by design, summoned and dismissed. Nothing restored a persistent vertical bar. This does.

The product

Built as a finished, shippable tool

The add-on bar docked in Blender's left toolbar next to the viewport.
Left toolbar or N-panel. The classic position, restored — or move it to the right, with your own tab name.
Right-click context menu on a brush showing the Pin as Favorite entry.
Right-click to pin. Favorites move to a ★ section at the top of the bar, reorderable.
Favorites Only mode enabled, showing a compact bar with six brushes.
Favorites-only mode. One click hides everything but the brushes you actually use.
The bar working in Weight Paint mode with weight brush thumbnails.
All four paint modes. Sculpt, Vertex Paint, Weight Paint and Texture Paint, each with its own brushes.
The add-on preferences panel showing position, shortcut modifier and the favorites list.
One preferences panel. Position, shortcut modifier, and a reorderable favorites list. Keyboard slots default to Ctrl+Alt+1…0 — plain Alt and Ctrl collide with Blender's own Subdivision Set shortcuts in Sculpt mode.

Engineering

Why it stays fast, and why it keeps working

  • Nothing touches the disk while drawing. Library scanning and thumbnail loading run in the background on a strict time budget, so the viewport stays responsive with hundreds of brushes.
  • Brushes are keyed, never named. The index stores a stable triplet (library type, library id, relative id) and caches it on disk — renaming a file doesn't silently break your favorites; it marks them as missing and offers a repair.
  • Tested where it ships. The suite of 48 tests runs headless on Blender 4.3, 4.5 LTS, 5.0 and 5.2 before every release — the same four versions listed as supported.
  • Proven in a real session, not just in tests. Every feature was verified in a live Blender instance: thumbnails rendering, shortcut activation, pinning, reordering, UI scaling from 0.75 to 2.0.

At a glance

Specification

Version
1.0.0
Blender
4.3 → 5.2
Format
Extension (.zip)
License
GPL-3.0-or-later
Modes
Sculpt · Vertex · Weight · Texture
Dependencies
None — pure Python
Tests
48 × 4 versions
Network
Never — works offline

Who's behind it

Made and maintained by one developer

Vertical Brush Bar is built by Raphael C., an independent developer. It isn't a quick script thrown over the wall — it was written as a finished product, tested like one, and meant to be kept working.

  • Maintained across versions. Every release is re-tested on Blender 4.3, 4.5 LTS, 5.0 and 5.2 before it ships, and support follows new Blender versions as they arrive.
  • Support from the author. Questions and bug reports go straight to the person who wrote the code, and fixes ship as free updates — no reseller in between.
  • Open by license. It's GPL-3.0: the complete, readable source ships inside every copy. Nothing is obfuscated, and it never connects to the network.