Brushes & Brush Dynamics

The top of the Paint sidebar is the brush picker: a grid of every brush image in your library, with the default round brush always first. Any greyscale or alpha image can become a brush — import one and it stamps that shape instead of a plain disc.

The brush library

Hovering a thumbnail shows a large preview; right-clicking offers Duplicate Brush, Rename Brush, Move to Folder, Export Brush..., Export Folder... and Delete Brush. Every setting on this page — the dynamics sliders, plus the Rake, Drop and Brush Mode settings from the next page — belongs to the selected brush, so each brush keeps its own setup.

Changing a setting does not save it. Save Brush, below the live preview, is the only thing that writes a brush: it 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 default round brush can be saved this way too). Reset Brush beside it puts the brush back as it was last saved, dropping every change since. A dot in the corner of a thumbnail marks unsaved changes: green on the brush in hand, red on a brush you changed and then left this session (the changes come back when you pick it again).

Rake and Drop grey out for the default round brush, since a round dab looks the same at every angle. To bring in brush images or Photoshop and GIMP brush sets, see Brush Library & Import.

The live stroke preview

Below the picker, a sample stroke is redrawn continuously along an S-curve using the selected brush and every active setting — size, spacing, scatter, color jitter, blend mode, rake, falloff — so you can see what a stroke will do before touching the model. Click anywhere inside the preview to change its backdrop color (useful when judging a light brush against the default dark background, or vice versa).

Brush Shape Dynamics, Scattering & Color Dynamics

Three accordions of Photoshop-style per-dab variation, all percentages from 0 (off) to 100:

• Size Jitter — randomly shrinks each dab (never grows past the slider's radius).
• Angle / Rotation Jitter — randomly rotates each dab's image.
• Scatter and Scatter Count — spreads up to 16 dabs per stamp around the stroke line, with Count Jitter varying how many.
• Spacing Jitter — varies the gap between stamps.
• Hue / Saturation / Brightness / Opacity Jitter — varies each dab's color and opacity. Hue drifts both directions; the others reduce only, matching Photoshop's convention.

The jitter is deterministic per stroke: when you release the mouse and Vertexix redraws the committed stroke at full precision, every dab reproduces the exact size, angle and color the live preview showed — what you saw while dragging is what lands in the texture.