Using Base Textures for Sub-Brushes (Multi-Brushes)?

[castanie]

TL;DR:
Sub-brushes have an option to specify a base texture, but their parent brush only "sees" the brush nozzles and ignores their base texture.

Is this a bug? Or is this intended?

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I want to create a pixel brush that simulates "ordered dithering patterns" (Ordered dithering - Wikipedia) for painting gradients in pixel art.
The end result should look something like this:



What Works: Basic Dithering Brush
It is important that these patterns are aligned pixel-perfect so that an area doesn't change no matter how often I paint over it (given the same dithering pattern).
This is easy enough - I know I can achieve this is by creating a new round brush ("Brushes" > "New Round Brush") and simply adding a base texture ("Base Texture" > "Set Texture"):



This works perfectly fine - I'd just have to make a separate brush for each dithering pattern (±16 brushes). Having to change between brushes all the time to get different gradient levels isn't too nice, though.

The Problem: Adding Pressure Sensitivity
I want to add pressure sensitivity so that each pattern gets "triggered" by applying some pressure.
In theory I could do this by adding multiple sub-brushes, each using one of the dithering patterns as their base texture, and adding some step function in the "Dynamics" tab so that only one sub-brush is drawn at any time.



For some reason this doesn't work, though (see above).
It seems like sub-brushes don't use their base texture at all, the parent brush only "sees" the brush nozzles of the sub-brushes.

Is this a bug? Or is this intended?
Does anyone know how to solve this problem in a different way?

Edited November 4, 2023 by castanie
Added a TL;DR.

[Lee D]

@castanie Welcome to the forums.

I don't believe the brushes will work in the way you'd like and the only other way I can think of is to use separate brushes for each pattern. This should give you greater control over each one depending on what the use will be.

You can always post in our Feedback and Suggestions section of the forum. It may be an improvement that gets added to a future version.