Brush Engine 2.0 is here

Brush Engine 2.0 is live. If you have opened Brush Hub lately, you have already seen the biggest change Sketchbug has shipped to custom brushes. The old single page form is gone, and in its place is a proper studio built around one idea:

Shape + grain = your brush.

Everything else, from taper to color dynamics to how the stroke lays down on the canvas, hangs off those two pillars. Pick a silhouette, pick a texture, then work through the sections on the left until the stroke feels right. Test it on the canvas on the right before you save.

This is a big step forward. It is also not the last step.

Another update is coming

We deliberately kept this release focused. The engine underneath is more capable than what you can currently tune in the interface, and we are already working on a follow up update that brings more utility back into the studio, the kind of controls you want when you need to push a brush further.

I will share details when that update is ready. For now, think of Brush Engine 2.0 as the foundation: a real brush engine, a studio layout that can grow, and a test canvas that finally matches what you get in the sketch editor.

What changed: the old creator versus Brush Studio

If you used the original brush creator, here is what is different, and why.

From one long form to a studio layout

Before, Brush Hub opened a two column page with a single scrolling form on the left. Name, description, a preview strip, tip shape icons, spacing, flow, pressure toggles, and texture pills were all stacked together with the test canvas beside them. It worked, but it felt like filling out a settings sheet.

Now the studio has three columns. On the left is a sidebar with eight focused sections. In the middle are the controls for whichever section you picked, above the equation bar that shows your shape, your grain, and the resulting stroke. On the right is a test canvas with its own size, opacity, and color controls.

The mental model changed. Instead of nudging sliders until a small preview strip looks about right, you build the brush one piece at a time and paint with it as you go.

Stroke path

Spacing now goes up to 400 percent instead of 200, and it sits alongside jitter and falloff with a short explanation under each slider so you know what you are changing.

Shape got its own section

Before, you picked Round, Square, Flat, or Import from a small icon row near the top of the form, and that was roughly it for shape.

Now Shape opens a source library, and you also get scatter, stamp count with jitter, rotation against or with the stroke, flip on both axes, flat 90 degree rotation, and pressure roundness for stylus input. Shape is no longer just which stamp you use. It is how that stamp behaves along the path.

Grain became a first class feature

Before, texture was three pills: Smooth, Grain, and Splatter, with a single amount slider. Built in procedural grain was the only real option.

Now grain is a full pipeline. You can keep a smooth fill or import your own photo. Then you choose how that texture behaves:

• Moving drags the grain along with the stroke, like a locked paint roller. Streaky, smeared, painterly.
• Texturized keeps the grain fixed on the canvas, like an unlocked roller, so the stroke reveals texture as it passes over it. Crisp and stencil like.

Imported photos can also go through an Auto repeat tile editor with scale, rotation, border overlap, mask hardness, mirror overlap, and pyramid blending, so your texture tiles without visible seams.

This is the single biggest capability gap between old and new. The old creator could not do photo grain, moving grain, or canvas fixed texture at all.

Taper did not exist before

The old creator had no taper controls. Strokes were uniform from start to finish unless pressure changed the size or opacity.

Now you get two separate profiles: one for pressure input from a stylus, and one for non-pressure input from a mouse, trackpad, or finger. Each has draggable start and end handles on a visual bar, plus size, opacity, and sharpness.

There is also a Preview while drawing toggle. Leave it on to watch the taper form as you draw, or turn it off to reveal the tapered ends only when you lift the pen.

That toggle exists because taper is measured against the total length of the stroke, and the total length keeps changing while you are still drawing. With preview on, the engine redraws the whole stroke each frame so the taper stays correct as the stroke grows.

Color and speed got room to breathe

Color jitter and speed dynamics were not exposed in the old creator at all. Now they have their own sections:

• Color dynamics covers per stamp and per stroke jitter for hue, saturation, lightness, and darkness, plus pressure driven hue, saturation, and brightness shifts.
• Dynamics covers speed affecting size, opacity, and spacing, along with random size and opacity jitter.

What moved, and what is waiting

A few things from the old form are somewhere else now, or are waiting on the next update:

• Name and description moved from the top of the form to the About this brush section at the end.
• Tip shape icons became the Shape source library.
• The preview strip became the equation bar plus the live test canvas.
• Follow stroke was replaced by the shape rotation slider, which gives you rotation against or with the stroke on one control.
• Row multiply is gone from the interface. Brushes that used multiple stamp rows migrate to stamp count automatically.
• Flow, rendering modes, wet mix, and stylus tilt mapping all live in the engine and still affect how brushes paint, but they are not exposed in the studio yet. Those are the controls the next utility update is for.
• Pressure to size and opacity are on by default and still work on canvas, they just do not have toggles in the studio right now.

The test canvas matches the sketch editor

The old test canvas drew strokes, but it did not share the full live rendering path with the main editor, especially for grain, taper, and opacity.

Now both use the same engine: live segment drawing, static grain layer compositing, moving grain drag, dual taper profiles, coalesced pointer events for tablets, and a final full quality pass when you lift the pen. What you paint in Brush Studio is what you get when you use the brush on a sketch.

Your saved brushes still work

If you made brushes before this update, they still load. The engine normalizes older settings on the way in, so old grain modes, taper fields, follow stroke rotation, and multi row stamps all migrate cleanly. You do not need to rebuild your library.

Why we rebuilt it

The old brush creator was fine for simple stamps. It was not fine for what Sketchbug brushes were turning into: photo textures, grain that either moves or stays put, taper that responds differently to a pen than to a mouse, and strokes complex enough to be worth sharing on Brush Hub or using in a live sketch session.

Brush Engine 2.0 is the engine those features needed, wrapped in a studio that can keep growing. This release is about getting the core right. The next one adds the utility layer on top.

Try it

Open sketchbug.art, go to Brush Hub, and hit the + button. Pick a soft round shape, import a photo for grain, switch between Moving and Texturized, and draw a few strokes on the test canvas. Then save it and use it on a real sketch.

If something feels missing, it probably is, and we are already working on it.

Draw it. Keep it. Build the brush.