Brush Library & Import

Your brushes live in the brush picker at the top of the Brush Settings accordion, on both the Paint and the Sculpt tab — one library and one selection for both. This page covers keeping that library organised: folders, saving and exporting brushes, and bringing in brushes from Photoshop, GIMP, Krita and MyPaint. The picker's grid, hover preview and the per-brush dynamics are described in Brushes & Brush Dynamics.

Brush folders

Above the grid is a folder row. The dropdown chooses which folder the grid shows: Brushes holds everything that is not in a folder, and every other entry is a folder of its own. The row only shows folders once you have one, and it follows your selection — pick, import or load a brush and the folder it lives in comes into view.

Control	What it does
New folder (folder icon, left of the dropdown)	Asks for a Folder name and makes an empty folder. Move brushes into it from a brush's right-click menu. A folder left with no brushes goes away by itself.
Folder dropdown	Shows one folder's brushes at a time. An imported brush set (.abr, .gbr, .gih) gets a folder of its own; Brushes holds everything else.
Delete folder (trash icon)	Appears when a folder other than Brushes is shown. Deletes the folder and every brush in it, after asking you to confirm.

The brush right-click menu

Right-click any brush thumbnail in the grid for:

Item	What it does
Duplicate Brush	Makes a copy of the brush, so you can change one without losing the other.
Rename Brush	Asks for a new Brush name.
Move to Folder	A submenu of Brushes and every folder except the one the brush is already in. With no folders yet, it tells you to make one with the folder button.
Export Brush...	Writes this one brush to a .vxbrush file you can share or keep as a backup.
Export Folder...	Writes every brush in the same folder to a single .vxbrush file, named after the folder.
Delete Brush	Removes the brush from the library.

Exporting opens an Export brushes save dialog; the status bar then reports how many brushes were written. A .vxbrush file goes back in through the import cell, on this or another machine.

Saving a brush

Changing a brush setting does not save it. Below the picker, Save Brush saves the brush, with every setting as it is now, as a new brush in the Brushes folder under a name you give it — the prompt starts with the current brush's name. The default round brush can be saved this way too, which is how you turn a tuned round brush into a brush of its own.

Reset Brush, beside it, puts the brush back as it was last saved, dropping every change made since. Clicking the brush you already have selected, while it has changes, asks the same question.

The thumbnails show which brushes have changes waiting: a green dot in the corner of the brush in hand when it differs from its saved version, and a red dot on a brush you changed and then left this session (its changes come back when you pick it again). No dot means the brush matches its save.

Importing brushes

The last cell of the grid, the +, imports. Its tooltip sums it up: import a brush image (greyscale, up to 2048×2048 px), or a brush set from Photoshop (.abr) or GIMP (.gbr, .gih) — a set gets a folder of its own. The file dialog accepts:

• Images — PNG, JPEG, BMP, TGA, GIF, HDR and PSD. A single image becomes one brush, is selected straight away, and the status bar reports Brush imported with the file's name.
• Brush files — Vertexix (.vxbrush), Photoshop (.abr), GIMP (.gbr, .gih), Krita (.kpp, .bundle) and MyPaint (.myb).

A brush file is read in the background, so a large set does not freeze the app. The status bar shows Importing brushes from … with a running count, then Imported N brushes from … when it is done, and the first imported brush is selected. Only one brush import runs at a time. If nothing could be read, the status bar says why.

What each format brings

Vertexix keeps as much of another program's brush as it has an equivalent for. What it cannot use yet is simply not applied.

Photoshop (.abr)

• Versions 1, 2, 6 and 10 (Photoshop CC's) are read.
• Each preset's tip image, its name and its spacing.
• From the preset's dynamics, when the preset turns that group on: Size, Angle and Opacity Jitter, Scatter, Count, Count Jitter, and Hue, Saturation and Brightness Jitter — the same settings described in Brush Shape Dynamics, Scattering & Color Dynamics.
• The preset's Texture settings and the set's Texture patterns, and its Dual Brush with the second tip.
• Photoshop's “computed” round brushes are skipped, because Vertexix's own round brush already covers them; the status bar says how many were skipped.

GIMP (.gbr, .gih)

• A .gbr brings its tip, its name and its spacing. A colour (RGBA) GIMP brush keeps its own colours.
• A .gih (an image hose) is an animated brush: several images, and every dab stamps one of them. It comes in as one brush, and a Pick Cells By dropdown appears with its settings: As Imported (the file's own rule), In Order, Random, Direction, Pen Pressure, Speed, Pen Tilt Left / Right, Pen Tilt Up / Down or First Cell Only.

Krita (.kpp, .bundle)

• A .kpp is one preset; a .bundle holds many, with their tips and patterns. A tip or pattern a preset names is looked for in the bundle first, then beside a Krita install and in your Krita user folder.
• Pixel brush and colour smudge presets come in as a tip with its dynamics: Size, Opacity, Flow, Rotation, Ratio and Scatter (each read as a pen control plus a jitter), Mirror as flip jitter, the colour options as Hue / Saturation / Brightness Jitter, Texture, the masked brush as a Dual Brush, and airbrushing. Krita's sensor curves are kept to their end points; their bends are not.
• Spray, bristle, hatching, grid, chalk, sketch, curve and particle presets are carried over as Vertexix's own equivalents. A Dyna preset becomes a brush with the Dyna smoothing style — see Stroke Smoothing.
• Presets for other Krita engines are not imported.

MyPaint (.myb)

A MyPaint brush is settings rather than an image. It comes in with its settings, a round tip at its hardness for the picker, its dab counts as spacing, its dabs per second as the airbrush, and its slow tracking as stroke smoothing. While a MyPaint brush is selected, the Paint tab notes under the picker that the brush's own settings set each dab's size, opacity, hardness, shape and smudge from pressure, speed and direction, and that Size is its base size.

Vertexix (.vxbrush)

The library's own export format, from Export Brush... and Export Folder.... It carries each brush's image and settings plus anything the brush relies on (its Dual Brush's second tip, its Texture's pattern). Importing one puts the brushes back in the folder they were exported from, making the folder if needed.