How to embed alphas and icons in brushes in Blender 4.3 for distribution?

Support Basics & Interface
1

Hi,
We make products for Blender, and usually brushes. Usually we put the .blend files with the brushes to append, and they load their icons and alphas from two folders that are in the same place. The urls are relative, so if you move all them together, you can put them elsewhere and they will work.

With the new Asset Browser, we are now trying to package them as assets for Blender 4.3 and above too. If we mark them as assets, save a blender file, they will work, but they need the icons and the aphas folders with them to work. So we have several folders and .blend files that load assets. All urls are relative.

But it may be confusing for some people to load, or if they move the folders, it may break.

I’ve seen some other people made brushes that seem to just distribute 1 file with .blend extension with the brushes inside. There is no other folder with icons and alphas.

It seems like they are embedded into the brushes and saved into the .blend file.

How do you do that?

Thanks a lot in advance.

  • Jordi of ArtisticSquad.
3

You may have alook here ? ( i don’t use this myself):

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4

The problem is not to make the brushes. We have lots of brushes already made for Blender, including some VDM packs.
I also saw that if I use the menu Export/Pack to gather the resources, I can make a single file for brushes.
But the icon is not displayed in the Tool properties. It displays everywhere else, but not there.

That’s why I would like to see if there is a tutorial on how to pack brushes for Blender 4.3 and above, using the asset thing, not the classical way. I may be missing some step.
I have checked the docs of the new features, but I don’t find any tutorial that is complete about authoring brushes for the Asset Browser, the new way from Blender 4.3

5

Ohh… i was under the impression that importing them will also make ant default icon or use some custom icons…

( I have to have a proper look at “advanced” asset and icon management i guess… :sweat_smile: )

6

I don’t know. The icons work and exist, but in the Tool properties they show 1 sec and then are replaced by a blank image.
Maybe it’s a bug. I will try to find why it happens.

7

Okay… another shoot in the dark ( :wink: )…

Maybe this “trick” with appending this handler is a hint ??

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8

Thank you! :slight_smile: I will check if what they had with the plugin may be related. I think that I can look into this and find the reason, but it will require time.
Possibly is something silly like the naming of the files, or the file format.
Or some double reference to the icons, that load for something and not for the other thing.
If I find out why I’ll post here too.
I want to update all our products so they support the asset browser fully. Now only the problem with the icons is the obstacle for that.

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9

Sometimes i can’t stop thinking about things… until i wrote it down and maybe even put it into the trash bin… :sweat_smile:

I just stumpled over this one:

The dev didn’t have time to adapt it to 4.3 yet… but maybe there is an opportunity for some collaboration ??

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