It seems you cannot control the size of objects being inserted with the new insert brushes.
Drag in one direction and it sizes up.
Drag in another direction and it sizes up
In fact drag in any direction at all and it sizes up. There is no way to size correctly and bring it back down.
Very briefly it will scale down along the two other axis from the normal, but then resize up once those two invert and the proportions are back to normal.
This behavior cannot possibly be right.
Works fine for me. Try holding shift after making your initial contact with the tool to scale the shape uniformly.
[Edit] Other thoughts: Barring some configuration issue with your input device, strange things sometimes happen when the object is too big/small in the worldspace. As an experiment, trying using “Deformation>Unify” on your mesh to normalize the size and see if that does anything. If you are inserting a custom object, perhaps there is an issue with that object. Try the default primitive insert tools (insert sphere, cube, etc).
Otherwise, I assure you I can size up/down the inserted meshes just fine.
You do not need to scale or position an inserted mesh precisely when you first draw it. The rest of the mesh is automatically masked, so all you need to do is switch on Scale mode and then you will be able to use the Transpose actionline to scale the mesh (the same applies to Move and Rotate modes). When you are done, switch back to Draw mode before Ctrl+dragging the background to remesh your model with Dynamesh.
OK, so that still doesn’t solve the problem that the default behavior is fundamentally broken. If you need to hold down mystery secret modifier key to make it work as it should do in the first place then that’s a bug. It should be fixed, simple as that.
The fundamental behavior is not broken. Like many, MANY programs, you can scale with tool casually without regard to aspect ratio by default, if precision is not required, and alter the shape of the tool by “stretching” along an axis, which is sometimes desirous. By holding down a constrain button, the object scales uniformly. This is no different than say, Photoshop. This is a conventional software behavior.
You may be experiencing a local issue, but I think you should relax a bit with that “broken” word. I don’t think it means what you think it does.
So please tell me how given the parameters you ascribe the tool as a “non proportional scaling tool” it’s working, a functional non-proprotional scaling tool. For instance how do you scale an object to be wider than it is tall? Or how to scale along just x, y or z? Also conversely how do you can scale down along the normal of the surface being inserted on. Using the non-proportional scaling tool here of course, no modifiers should be required after all this is conventional use and behavior of such a tool in software from Photoshop to 3DMax, though interestingly it should be noted that inserting geometry in z-brush until now hasn’t attempted this, and certainly not in such an ass-backward way.
I do hope that it wasn’t the suggestion of some clueless beta tester. Non-proprtional scaling can be achieved any number of ways, but no-one would seriously pick the planner scaling method to draw out an object on a single click (especially not bi-axis mouse drag) and chose it to be the default to actually create objects, it doesn’t work, it’s non-functioning by any definition, therefore it’s broken. Anyone with one iota of common sense would when given this option have set out proportional as the default and non-proportional/planar on modifier which would have solved all of those issues instantly and allowed the planar scaling to work correctly instead of clearly being the result of shoehorning a bad idea into a tool that cannot work properly this way. Even assuming that planner scaling should be the starting behavior then normal scaling should be disabled and normal scaling should be the modifier, thus click drag out to radius modifier drag out to depth. That’s simple. This is not and it doesn’t work, therefore it’s functionally broken.