Asset Browser

I was unable to find it so can someone tell me how asset browser works? Are those draged assets a linked/instanced object?
Also is it possible/or it will be in future to make parametric assets? For example: I dragged to scene 1 chair, duplicate it and give it another material and those two chairs are still instanced. Similar to Unreal where meshes are instanced but we can add many materials with different parameters.

It doesnā€™t. Thereā€™s a thing in master that is called the Asset Browser, but itā€™s not the thing theyā€™re showing in the video. Yes, that sucks.

I imagine it will eventually be possible to build parametric assets by storing objects with Geometry Nodes on them.

You can have different materials on linked duplicates since forever, all you have to do is switch the material data block from Mesh to Object. With objects instanced via collections, it will eventually be possible to have different materials using the Overrides system, but thatā€™s also not in master yet.

Blender still has a lot of catching up to do.

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Very interesting. Especially separation to Catalogs and dynamic tag system.
Also from this doc it looks that tool management by Asset Browser is tricky when it comes to design.

This probably explains why the only thing Iā€™ve marked asset (a few custom materials) are duplicating itself like crazy and flooding my asset library, and canā€™t be directly deleted from within the asset browser.

*using very new 4-days-old 3.0 Alpha

It seems the asset description and tags are not saved with the asset itself but within the Asset Browser. So I have no idea where that data is being saved and how to move it along with the actual asset .blend files to another computer. There are several proposals on RCS asking for the ability to give every object/data-block a description since years before the Asset Browser work began.

It is convenient that I can right-click an asset and open its original Blend file, but after making a change itā€™s still a long and complicated process to show the updated asset in the current file (if you linked the asset). I also still have no clue how to quickly and easily convert a linked object/collection/asset into a local item that can be edited and Iā€™ve seriously looked several times per year for the last 2 and a half years.

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If the asset browser is visible when you mark something as an asset, it doesnā€™t generate a preview image and it takes several seconds to create the asset. If the asset browser is not visible it takes a fraction of a second and makes a preview image.

Collections take a long time to get marked as an asset and they donā€™t get thumbnails generated. However, I can make a collection instance and then mark that object as an asset and it gets a preview image. When I append that asset into another file it creates both the original collection and the collection instance. If I link it Iā€™m unable to move it unless I right click, ID Data , Make Library override. I really wish someone would make an in depth tutorial about that ID Data menu. First of all, why is it called ID Data?

Objects marked as assets seem to work fine except I think the automatic thumbnail camera is positioned relative to the objectā€™s local z axis instead of the world axis. So if i import an fbx and everything is sideways and then I rotate it to be correct and then make an asset, the thumbnail is at a very odd camera angle.

If an item is already an asset it shouldnā€™t show both ā€œmark assetā€ and ā€œclear assetā€ in the context menu.

Using append (reuse data) with a collection asset makes it appear twice in the viewport. Using undo immediately afterwards crashes Blender.

I hope all observing this post:

Iā€™m trying to turn the world from the official demo file for Nishita sky into an asset. It has drivers connected to an empty for easy control of the sun position. When I append the asset, both the world and the empty are added to the scene but the drivers seem to be broken.

I canā€™t make sense of how this thing works. In todayā€™s build if I drop a collection asset in the scene while the asset browser is set to ā€œLinkā€ I get a copy of the collection and its objects added to the scene and they are all locked and cannot be moved. Iā€™m pretty sure in previous builds it was dropping linked collection instances into the scene which made more sense in my opinion.

I need to know what the workflow is for when you add several objects with ā€œAppend (reuse data)ā€ and only much later realize your file is now 11 gigabytes too big and you need to replace all the collection instances with links to the original files.

Does anyone know how to make the Asset Browser generate preview images for COLLECTIONS?

update

Now my only problem is dragging a collection from the Asset Browser doesnā€™t only create a linked collection instance. It also creates a whole linked collection containing linked objects. At this point Iā€™m just using the Asset Browser as a guide and still using good old file > link

Are there any plans to integrate the asset browser into the shift + a (add) command in some way?

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A separate repository for the Add Menu or a way to tag assets to make it show up there would be very nice!

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Donā€™t know about asset and driver issues, but why not use builtin sun position addon to drive it?

I was going to post about this, Iā€™m too trying to figure out if thereā€™s a better workflow for this.
When working with lots of external assets, having to perform the override for each asset can take quite some time. I hope thereā€™s another solution, or if not, hopefully this will be addressed.

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I just wish I could find a decent tutorial about how to do this stuff created by someone who actually knows what theyā€™re doing. I donā€™t know what Iā€™m doing. I canā€™t find a good tutorial. It feels bad.

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Iā€™ll drink to that. I donā€™t know what Iā€™m doing wrong. Thought it would be more intuitive.

The 3.0 Asset Browser and itā€™s handling of collections (or lack there of) is so disappointing.

The Alpha build I was using from September seems to work better. You can at least append an instance collection and not get the duplicates that 3.0 release now has.

Such a disappointment. The workflow is not useable unless you have single object assets.

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Is it normal that catalogs ive setup in the original blend file will not show up in new blend files?

Material or asset inside a blend file > mark as asset > move that into a manually made catalog like ā€œMaterialsā€ or ā€œAssets newā€ > save that blend into your custom file path for your asset library.
Make a new blend file where you want to use those > open asset manager > in your custom library there is just ā€œAllā€ and ā€œUnassignedā€. Is that the correct behavior or do I something wrong?
Whats the point of having catalogs when they dont carry over to new projects?

thx

Edit: meant catalogs not categories