I’d like to initiate a discussion about getting an official Blender material repository on-line. The old one appeared to be going through a re-vamp a year ago when its maintainer went on a trip (according to his Twitter feed) at which point the updates, and I assume the development of the site, stopped. I appreciate the work that the original site creator put into both the old and new sites, but after waiting for news about the “new” BMR since last June, I think it would be fair to say that his new site’s launch may never happen.
Not being a C programmer, I have been unable to contribute to the Blender community from the code side. I’ve purchased all the Blender books that have been published and buy other things from the Blender E-Shop, but I never really feel like I’ve contributed enough to Blender. If I can rally support behind getting an official materials site on-line and provide the hosting costs, I think I’d feel like I’ve given back to the Blender community.
I know Python, PHP, MySQL and some JavaScript and have done some customization of Wordpress themes. I wouldn’t have time to build a site from scratch alone, but would be able to do back-end admin and some minor scripting and CSS. If I could recruit a small team to take care of the rest of the development I’d be happy to pay for domain registration and hosting costs for the first five years.
If any of you have any thoughts on my proposal or would like to contribute towards the development in some way, just respond here on the forum. Once the team is in place and work begins on the site itself, we can take the conversation off to our own discussion forum or other medium.
I’d be curious about how successfully it could go through www.blendswap.com, which is what Durian’s been using for asset trading. If that were a viable option, I’d want to get the old material repository transferred there, as Blendswap’s material library is still lacking in comparison to the the blender material repository.
BlendSwap is fine, though it lacks many of the things that made the original BMR great. Things like advanced search, automatic (and standardized) thumbnails, etc.
I think one option would be to do an installation of ResourceSpace. That might be considered by some to be overkill, but it would provide a means to include licensing options and would cover materials as well as models, particle systems, etc. And one nice thing about ResourceSpace is that it can be configured to create Blender thumbnails automatically. Plus, ResourceSpace is Open Source, so it fits in nicely with the whole Blender dynamic.
I believe that ResourceSpace needs to be installed on a dedicated server in order to run a lot of its functionality, especially the Blender thumbnails. This would make hosting a little more expensive, but I’m taking care of that, so if RS turns out to be the best option we’ll run with it.
One thing to consider about ResourceSpace is that it requires an admin to manually approve all submissions (receive a notification email, then visit the site to manually change the status of an uploaded resource). The only way around this (unless you know php) is if you allow user submissions to bypass the “Pending Review” status. However, doing this gives everyone access rights to edit submissions other than their own. Yeah, pretty goofy.
It’s a great tool and I use it with my forums, but I’m very disappointed in their limited view of how people might actually use their app. YMMV.
EDIT: many have asked the devs, via forums, about how to address this but they don’t seem to be willing to provide a real solution. As far as I could tell, it’s been an issue for years (based on the forum threads).
