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Known Participant
December 21, 2018
Question

Brush Size Shortcut? Surely there's a better way of doing this?

  • December 21, 2018
  • 3 replies
  • 13752 views

Is there a fast way of resizing the brush in Adobe Animate/Flash? In Photoshop, for example, you hold alt + right button and drag, or you can right click anywhere and slide the slider that pops up. In Toon Boom Harmony you just hold O and drag left/right, and in Autodesk Sketchbook you hold the brush on a bit of ui and slide left/right. The only shortcut I've found in Animate is pressing '[' and ']' which make the brush size bigger/smaller in 1 pixel increments. Since often you want to change from, say, a 10 pixel brush to a 50 pixel brush, you would have to press the ']' button 40 times, which...isn't really a shortcut? Gonna say that's actually a longcut maybe? Does anyone have a better way of doing this? Seems like a pretty basic thing to want to do!

Help would be appreciated, before I wear out the ]]]]]]]]]]]]]]]] on my keyboard 🙂

3 replies

Participant
January 15, 2025

im extremely late but what I did was use a program called "X-Mouse Button Control" and I have side buttons on my mouse so I selected "Simulated Keys" on each button and put "]" for my top button and "[" for my bottom button and put the option "6 Repeatedly while the button is down" to repeat the process until I see fit. But without side buttons and you just want to bind it to a keyboard key you'd have to use an automatic key presser like "Auto Hotkey" or something gaming softwares use

Community Expert
December 21, 2018

For all your shortcut needs.

Adobe Animate CC keyboard shortcuts

Known Participant
December 27, 2018

Thanks nick, but that shortcut list doesn't even include the [ ] brush size shortcut that is already in there, let alone a better shortcut! Obviously that's Adobe's fault, not yours though :-)

I'm beginning to think there isn't a way of doing this, in which case it would be a feature request, although imho it's pretty insane that after over 20 years of development this software still doesn't have a good way of changing the brush size, seems like a relatively basic thing for an animator to want :-P

Boscoverde
Known Participant
January 23, 2022

Completely agree! I can't believe there isn't better shortcut management!

gener7
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 21, 2018

Coming from the Photoshop side of things, Shift + [ or ] modifies the size by 10x    In my case the up/down keyboard arrows increments a brush size by 1, pressing the Shift key jumps it by increments of 10. I'm not sure how Animate does things, but hold down the Shift key while pressing the square brackets should make your brush size change quicker.

Gene

Known Participant
December 21, 2018

gener7  wrote

hold down the Shift key while pressing the square brackets should make your brush size change quicker

In Adobe Animate holding shift and pressing ']' still just increments it by 1, so sadly that doesn't help at all :-(

gener7
Community Expert
Community Expert
December 21, 2018

There's also a slider option: Brush tool in Animate CC