Blender 4.3 replaced the vertical brush toolbar with the horizontal asset shelf. If you sculpt, you felt it immediately: brushes moved to a shelf at the bottom of the screen, your muscle memory stopped working, and switching brushes — something you do constantly — started costing extra clicks.

Vertical Brush Bar brings the vertical toolbar back — and makes it better than it ever was. Unlike radial menus and popup wheels, this is a real toolbar: always on screen, not something you summon and lose.

Your brushes, always in reach

A persistent vertical column of real brush thumbnails lives in the left toolbar, exactly where brushes used to be. One click activates a brush. No popups, no shelf, no digging.

• Every library, automatically — Essentials plus all your custom brush asset libraries (Orb brushes, purchased packs, your own saved brushes) are scanned and displayed. New brushes appear on their own; libraries are rescanned when files change on disk.
• All paint modes — Sculpt, Vertex Paint, Weight Paint and Texture Paint each show their own brushes.
• Smooth by design — scanning and thumbnail loading run in the background with a strict time budget, and the drawing code never reads the disk. Designed so the viewport stays responsive, even with hundreds of brushes.

Favorites that work like you do

• Pin with a right-click — pinned brushes move to the ★ favorites section at the top of the bar.
• Reorder freely — move favorites up and down until the order matches your workflow.
• Favorites-only mode — one click hides everything except your pinned brushes. A compact bar with only the 6–10 brushes you actually use.
• Keyboard slots — Ctrl+Alt+1…0 activates your first ten favorites without touching the mouse. The modifier is configurable (Ctrl+Alt by default because plain Alt+1…5 and Ctrl+1…5 collide with Blender's built-in Subdivision Set shortcuts in Sculpt mode — we checked).

Your bar, your side

• Left toolbar or N-panel — keep the bar in the left toolbar (like the good old days) or move it to the right N-panel, with a custom tab name if you want.
• Thumbnail size follows you — drag the toolbar edge for bigger thumbnails; the layout adapts from a single column to a grid. Respects your UI scale from 0.75 to 2.0+.

Compatibility

• Blender 4.3 → 5.2 — the automated test suite (48 tests) runs on Blender 4.3, 4.5 LTS, 5.0 and 5.2 before every release.
• Blender extension format — installs by drag-and-dropping the zip into Blender, or via Preferences → Get Extensions → Install from Disk.
• Pure Python — no compiled dependencies, nothing to download at runtime, works offline.

FAQ

Does it work with my custom brush packs?

Yes. Any brush asset library registered in Blender (Preferences → File Paths → Asset Libraries) appears automatically.

Does it replace or hide the asset shelf?

No. It is fully independent — keep the shelf, hide it, or use both.

Why is the default shortcut Ctrl+Alt+number and not Alt+number?

In Sculpt mode, Blender itself uses Alt+1…5 and Ctrl+1…5 for Subdivision Set. Ctrl+Alt is collision-free out of the box, and you can switch the modifier to Alt or Ctrl in the add-on preferences if your keymap differs.

Does it slow Blender down?

It is built not to: the index of your libraries is cached on disk, thumbnails are loaded lazily in the background, and the drawing code never touches the disk. The first scan of a very large library runs in the background too.

What happens to my favorites when I update the add-on?

Favorites, order, position and shortcut settings are stored in Blender preferences — they survive restarts, add-on updates and reinstalls. When you upgrade to a new major Blender version, use Blender's standard preference import on first launch and they come along.