Sculptools Palette Organises Blender Sculpting

For those who don’t know the tool: Sculptools: Palette is a Blender 4.5+ extension that reorganises Sculpt Mode brushes and native tools into configurable radial palettes. It stays inside the DCC, reads brush thumbnails from Blender Asset Libraries, stores its working state in Blender preferences, and is maintained by ProjectArgo as GPL-3.0-or-later Python source on GitHub.

A palette, not a new brush engine

ProjectArgo has released Sculptools: Palette 1.1.0, a free Blender extension that places frequently used sculpt brushes and selected Sculpt Mode tools in a radial interface. The extension does not add a brush engine, remesher, geometry processor or interchange format. Instead, it registers Python operators and keymaps, invokes Blender’s existing brushes and sculpt tools, and draws its interface as a two-dimensional viewport overlay through Blender’s GPU and font APIs. Polygons therefore remain stubbornly dependent on the artist.

Sculptools: Palette should not change the result, but its value lies in reducing navigation between the viewport, toolbar, Asset Shelf and brush controls, particularly on workstations where screen space or pen travel is at a premium.

Eight palettes under the cursor

The extension supports as many as eight palettes. Each palette can expose between two and ten main positions, while every main position can hold three additional sub-slots. The initial configuration uses six main slots, but artists can change the count independently for each palette. A slot can reference a sculpt brush or one of the supported native tools and actions.

By default, the backslash key opens the wheel beneath the cursor in Sculpt Mode. Artists can click an entry, flick towards it, select it with the number row, or hover over a populated position to fan out its three sub-slots. Tab and Shift+Tab cycle through palettes, while Ctrl combined with a number jumps directly to one of the eight palettes. The jump modifier can instead use Alt or Shift, and the open and cycle shortcuts are configurable.

Brushes can be assigned from the wheel, from Blender’s Asset Shelf or from the brush menu. The extension uses thumbnails from available asset libraries rather than generating an unrelated set of icons. Slots also provide cut, copy, paste and removal operations, which makes palette restructuring less tedious than rebuilding every assignment from scratch.

The wheel is not restricted to brushes. Its built-in catalogue covers sculpt operations grouped around adding geometry, masking, hiding, Face Sets, trimming, projection and filters. Several primitive-add tools, including cube, cone, cylinder and sphere variants, are explicitly gated to Blender 5.2 or newer.

Radius and strength without another panel

Sculptools: Palette also installs optional Dynamic Brush Sliders. A right-button drag moves brush radius along the horizontal axis and strength along the vertical axis. The operator waits for a small movement threshold before locking to an axis, helping distinguish a deliberate drag from a click. When Blender’s Unified Paint Settings are active, the extension adjusts the unified radius or strength; otherwise it changes the corresponding property on the active brush.

A quick right-click without a drag still opens Blender’s native Sculpt context panel, and modified right-click combinations using Ctrl, Alt or Shift are left to Blender or another keymap assignment. Dynamic Sliders are enabled by default but can be disabled. This is an artist-facing control over existing brush settings, not an API feature waiting for someone else to build the interface.

Quick Numbers are also enabled initially. The number keys select main slots, and repeated presses cycle through their sub-slots. Studios whose Sculpt Mode keymaps already depend on those keys can switch the feature off. The same caution applies to right-button tablet mappings: the extension tries to preserve a normal context-menu click, but a familiar studio keymap deserves more respect than a default checkbox.

The interface is extensively configurable

The Palette tab in Blender’s N-panel exposes the wheel’s visual and interaction settings. Artists can adjust palette radius, slot radius, hover timing, fade duration, colours, outline widths, glow properties, sub-slot scale and sub-slot distance. The source constrains palette radius to 180 through 300 pixels and main-slot radius to 30 through 60 pixels, providing useful latitude without allowing a wheel to occupy the entire monitor like an overfunded startup brochure.

These values and the palette assignments live in Blender add-on preferences rather than inside the current scene. That keeps the interface independent of individual .blend files, but it also means opening a production file on another workstation does not carry the artist’s palette configuration with it. Shared configurations therefore depend on the extension’s preset system and on the same brush assets being available at the destination.

The extension retains unresolved custom-brush assignments instead of silently deleting them. When an expected asset library is unavailable, the affected slot can display a missing state; if the library later returns, the assignment can resolve again. That behaviour is preferable to destructive housekeeping on a machine that merely lacks a network mount for the afternoon.

JSON presets carry configuration, not brushes

Preset export writes JSON containing the palettes, visual and interaction settings, add-on version, Blender version and customised hotkeys. Version 1.1.0 can include hotkeys during export, and import provides a checkbox controlling whether those shortcuts should be applied. The import process validates the incoming structure before replacing the active configuration.

Import replaces all existing palettes rather than merging individual entries, so artists should export their current setup before testing somebody else’s preset. The importer reports how many referenced brushes and tools it can find, which gives pipeline teams an immediate indication that the receiving workstation does not match the authoring environment.

The JSON stores brush names and tool specifications. It does not package custom brush assets, geometry, textures or an Asset Library. Preset sharing is therefore a configuration hand-off, not a method for smuggling a studio brush library through the door. Facilities still need to distribute and mount the referenced assets through their normal pipeline.

Users can install the extension from Blender’s Get Extensions interface, from the official listing, or by dragging the extension package into Blender. The published licence is GNU GPL 3.0 or later, so this is neither a time-limited trial nor a commercial permanent, subscription or rental licence. The official distribution is free and open source.