ImportingPre4point3BlenderBrushes_v001_2026-01-25.txt
Problem Background
Changing Blender Versions
Instructions for Importing Pre-4.3 Blender Brushes
Problem Background
I’ve been dusting off Blender and putting its brush systems through its paces. Mind that I’m working in version 5.0.1 presently and it had been a minute since I’d tinkered with settings. I encountered and worked through problems with both Texture Painting brushes and Grease Pencil brushes.
Texture Painting Brushes I didn’t have any preformatted brushes to import in blender files so I was importing Texture Mask images and making new brush assets. GIMP will open photoshop .abr brushes and other prepackaged brushes, and rightclicking in the brush menu you can open each as an image file. Convert to white on transparency seems to work best for Blender. Duplicate a default brush and populate the new Brush with the texture and settings that look decent with it. Rightclick in the brush tool menu brush list or in the Asset Tray, Edit a custom thumbnail. These are then available on demand as you set them up. This applies to Grease Pencil Brushes as well.
The Grease Pencil brushes I had in storage were in .blend files as brush packs. Loading these up directly or appending them to other blender files weren’t getting results matching the demonstrations in the brush packs, and weren’t listed as brushes but rather just materials, with a massive amount of settings differences implied, what a mess to redo each brush change. They were however loading just fine as intended on Blender version 3.0.1.
Web searches on this kept turning up https://blenderartists.org/t/previous-version-brushes-in-4-3/1560365/18 . After banging my head on this for entirely too long on these rather incomplete explanations I eventually got it working. This prompted me to write my own instructions.
Blender 4.3 changed usable brush selection to rely firmly on the Asset Library system, which involves marking brushes originating in a file or appended to a file to be marked as assets and saved or otherwise saved out to the asset library.
Following the post’s instructions, I tried marking brushes as assets in the Scene Outliner’s Blender File view. In Blender version 5.0.1 they did not move correctly into the tray, loading without their thumbnails. I did not rigorously test to see what other aspects also failed. Versions 3.0.1 through 4.2.17 LTS did not allow brushes to be marked as assets. 4.3, 4.5.6 LTS both allowed marking brushes as assets and they worked as expected.
Changing Blender Versions
I’m working on Pop!_OS which is an Ubuntu Linux derivative. This gives me several installation options and I had up to three versions installed at a time during this process to troubleshoot. The default repository version was 3.0.1, I can add a .deb file install, custom PPA repositories might have been an option, the Pop!_OS store had current Flatpack versions, and then there’s Snap install. There are app store integrations for snap but I used the command line in the terminal.
sudo snap install blender is a simple instruction for you to type or otherwise copy paste into the terminal. In my terminal copy paste isn’t just Ctrl+V, it’s Ctrl+Shift+V. This command gets you a current version that updates itself automatically as defined by my default system settings. Snap also offers ease of specifying which exact version I wanted without hunting it down.
Snapcraft.io/blender offers a tool for specifying the version in a dropdown menu, whereupon it produces a store link as well as command line text
sudo snap install blender --channel=4.5lts/stable --classic was offered as the instructions for installing 4.5 LTS, which I chose as it was the first LTS version after the 4.3 change to the brush assets system.
Having multiple snaps installed is not currently supported, you may have to remove the current snap install first. sudo snap remove blender
Instructions for Importing Pre-4.3 Blender Brushes
These should work for texture painting brushes, grease pencil brushes, and sculpting brushes. This worked in versions 4.3 and 4.5 but not in 5.0.1.
1) Note the file path of the User Library or any further asset library directories you made here and want to use, located in Application Menu > Edit > Preferences > File Paths.
2) Opening an old pre-4.3 brush pack blender file, the brushes are listed in the Scene Outliner > Blender Files. There one can select or multi-select the desired brushes and right click, then Mark as Asset.
3) Following the successful Mark as Asset operation with the brushes populating the asset tray and the Tool Options brush selector with their respective thumbnails from the original files, save(as) the file again. From here there are a few ways to utilize the marked assets in another blender file.
4) In your file browser place a copy of this new saved-asset-brush-containing .blend file in Assets folder, at the same tier as the Saved folder you would generate when you make a brush from scratch and save a file. When you load a new blender file with that asset library those asset brushes will be available for use.
5) Alternately, in the Asset Tray at the bottom of the viewport when in the relevant Drawing or Texture Painting or Sculpting modes, each asset can be individually right-clicked, in the popup menu choose to then Save Asset or Duplicate Asset (depending on the blender version) which will then create the filename.asset.blender file in the user asset library for that brush.
A) This .asset.blender file can be attached to a different open blender file by choosing File > Append
or
B) This .asset.blender file can be dropped into the relevant asset library folder under Assets > Saved > Brushes