I’ve been looking into redesigning my Blender interface to make it easier and more fun to use. One change that I think would be really cool to have would be a materials library with previews. I’m not looking for anything overly complicated like something that pulls materials from an online database. I’d just like to append materials from my local files and show previews for those materials. Basically, I’d like to have something like this: https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Extensions:2.6/Py/Scripts/Import-Export/Blend_Library that looks like this https://wiki.blender.org/index.php/File:Rl-ui_previews_iconview.png. If the previews can’t be auto generated from datablock previews, I would be fine with simply making images with the same name as the materials myself and having the addon read them (like Asset Flinger does). Does anyone know if that would be possible to accomplish? Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I have no experience with writing addons. If this is possible, can anyone direct me to resources that might help me to write this?
coming soon
It’s absolutely possible. Check out the demo of Pro Lighting Skies. That could be helpful to reverse engineer, if you’re wondering about thumbnails, json data, and UI integration.
it looks like a material browser will be part of the next hard ops plugin.
That looks like exactly what I was looking for, but since it isn’t released yet, I think I’ll keep looking for other options.
That’s cool, but I’m really looking for a free solution.
It’s true that it might be helpful, but since that’s only a demo release, I’m not sure if the license would allow me to work from that code.
The addon/code itself is released under the standard GPL. It’s only the demo image files which fall outside of that. And you can always contact the blenderguru people if you have any concerns.
Oh, okay. Thanks for the info. I’ll try to work with that code.
Have you looked into PBR Materials? Dynamat is nice, but I think PBR Materials is better.
I haven’t heard of this addon, but I’ll certainly check it out! It looks pretty cool!