Blender 2.8 might come with a set of built-in assets

General Forums Blender Development Discussion
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https://developer.blender.org/T55239

To note, one should not expect fully detailed cars, characters, buildings and the like, but a set that would provide a starting point for the majority of use cases without blowing up Blender’s file size. These would be bundled with Blender (ie. independent from the Blender Cloud) and be under the CC0 license.

On top of that, William is expecting the community to step up to the plate by providing what he thinks should be there by default (though it leaves me to wonder if it will also mean a fully functioning asset browser for 2.8 as well).

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I’ve always mourned Blender’s lack of a teapot. Maybe now’s the chance to right a grievous wrong.

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This should be a separate download.

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How about some camera light leaks, lens flares, and distortions? Some compositing effects and setups might be useful. Assuming the new asset manager can store scene and compositing assets?

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The list is pretty minimal. It will hardly bloat the download.

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They set a 100MB total cap for them too. So Blender will be around ~200-300MB. That’s not unreasonable to me. I’ve probably watched cat videos bigger than that.

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My only concern here is that these assets are always appended to user scenes, and never linked in. We don’t want to create a dependency on them that would break people’s scenes should the assets ever be swapped out for better ones.

I also think it should be an optional secondary download.

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Yeah, me too… Optional separate download.

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I like the idea of an asset browser. I think that and libraries of assets would be great.

Time spent setting that up would be better in he long run.

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A dream, but…

A really cool system would be some sort of an official repository that could be accessed within Blender for different assets, meaning not just models, but materials, addons, textures, rigs, etc. These ideally would live as an extension of the Asset Manager, maybe a tab that says “Online library” or something.

At the base level, it would be downloads for official packages from the Blender Institute. But expanded, it would be really useful to also allow users to upload/update their own (with patch notes, previews), and vote up/down others’ uploads (with flag/report option?). Aside from being able to easily see/search the different category of items, users can also sort by popularity, hot, official, new, etc. There could also be a “recommended” category that are like staff picks.

In fact, what if this could support sharing actual scene files as well? Easily share and learn workflows and techniques. A feature like this would really capture the “Open Source” spirit of Blender and would be a huge distinction from other 3D programs.

I don’t know… Maybe something like this is already planned with the Asset Manager for the future, but this is something I would love to see.

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Yeah for asset browser. Built in assets? Well, then please a separate download. Would be great to be able store them in one place and link blender to it. Since I usually have several Blender versions and configurations on my system I don’t like the idea of duplicates of assets built in in blender.

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Here is the design task for the Asset Manager.. It mentions repositories and other things.

I don’t know how the built-in stuff will work for sure. Custom matcaps and things currently just load from a directory. So I don’t think it will be the tedious nonsense we’ve always had to deal with in the past.

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Yeah. Built in is not wise.

But many apps already use a market place. Some even accessible within the app.

As described above one way to fund development would be to have the blender cloud and even blender market tied in.

Blender cloud members could access the cloud from within blender. And and even the blender market could be tied in.

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I’d just have two Blenders. One ships with assets included and one without.

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Yes there already is the cloud add-on. Comes in pretty handy. While I am not the guy demonizing all those network hooked up features I don’t think it’s wise to implement them as defaults. This should be available as optional modules. At least that’s my perception of how this could fit in Blenders philosophy.

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If it approaches 100MB I’d prefer it to be a separate archive. Else you’d double the available Blender versions in http://download.blender.org/release/Blender2.80/ providing bundled and not installers.

A procedural material library would be negligible in size, textures and meshes not so much unless they too could be generated procedurally by a bundled script.

Will this be included in daily builds?
Will we have a light version of Blender w/o these assets?

Hope not.
Hope so.

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interesting. I did not realize that. I am kind of old school in that regard. But I see the trends.

No matter what you do it needs to be in a separate library. And optional.

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3d studio Max has been released since version 1 back in 1996 , with an easy to use material editor and a substantial collection of default basic materials. Two decades after its about time for Blender to at least include a material library.

Better late than never :smiley:

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On thing I like on other software like painter, mudbox, mixer etc is the online library accessible via the soft himself.

The BF should do that, like that, no need to add extra mega to the downlad and unlimited acces to assets, to the cloud etc.

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As long as an offline library remains an option. One of the (many) nice things about Blender is that it runs on its own, doesn’t need an installation, and doesn’t need a constant online lifeline.
Especially in a corporate setting this can be important, software with builtin online data-transfer might need to be audited and approved by IT.

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