Grease Pencil Brush Saver Add On

It can be a little confusing when you save the next iteration of your .blend file and you find image textures or brushes disconnected because Blender is optimized to remove unused data blocks for the next save. Normally, you need to toggle between different tabs in 'Draw Mode' to access the save location of some of the data blocks.

The 'Grease Pencil Brush Saver' add-on consolidates all data-block save options in one panel in the 3D viewport for you to toggle on at one place and serves as a visual aid to toggle where you need to save texture files and brushes together. The add-on is designed to be used and installed in the beginning of a new .blend file on the default factory settings start up for Blender 3.6, 4.0, 4.1

• A button to pack resources including image textures into the .blend placed at the top for convenience.
• The first half of the panel lists all the images textures listed in rows with buttons to individually to save the data blocks.
• The second half of the panel allows you to toggle 'Pin' buttons that attach your materials to your brushes and also a button to 'Save" the materials associated to each individual Brush as you select materials in the material list. It will populate with the default Grease Pencil brushes and duplicated custom ones you create.

Currently, the second half does not work if you have added or removed default Weight Paint, Vertex Paint, Texture Paint or Sculpting brushes on the start up of a new .blend file to the 'Brushes' data block index. The second half might also stop working if you start adding those listed brushes in the middle of the .blend file. This might be the case if you are using a forked version of Blender/add-on, something like 'Heavypoly'. On default, Blender groups all these together as a 'Brushes' collection and the add on filters the non-Grease Pencil brushes out by name from 'Brushes' as it indexes through the collection and it will not work unless its the exact default 'Brushes' collection on startup. Maybe future iterations of Blender will eventually separate these... but for now they are all categorized together. I personally use Heavypoly on Blender 4.0 for my projects so I have a build version of this add-on specifically for a Heavypoly startup included in the download as well.

Youtube:

How I use the add-on:

1. I add a grease pencil object.
2. I delete the default materials associated with the grease pencil object and make a new material that represent the texture of the brush.
3. For each individual material, I import a brush texture and click 'Save' on the first half of the panel as it populates the add-on.
4. I duplicate an existing default brush to copy its brush pressure and opacity properties and rename it. It populates on the second half of the add on under Pin and Save Material to Brush'.
5. I make sure to 'Pin' that material that contains the custom texture to the new brush and 'Save Material'.
6. When finished with all your brushes I click 'Pack Resources' at the top to save the textures into my .blend file.

To download the add on; open Blender and go to the 'Edit' tab in the upper left -> 'Preferences' -> 'Add-ons' -> 'Install button' on the top right and click the Zip file. Do not extract it. Then make sure the checkbox for it is toggled on in the list. If you are having any issues with the add on you can message me at musubibiadventures@gmail.com, send me screenshots of the problem, and I will try my best to troubleshoot when I am available.

I may continue to work on the add on to improve it, and any future edited iterations will be included with the existing purchase and noted below. Purchases directly help me continue development. :)

Edits

5/13/2024 - Just checking if the brush set changed from 4.0 to 4.1 and if it affected the add-on's compatibility. Looks like it doesn't, so everything should also work for 4.1! I realized I might have accidentally deleted some weight paint brushes so that second part of the panel might not have showed up for the startup .blend files, I added them back in so the add on populates normally again.