Hi guys,
I’m trying to set a parent empty object as an asset that contains multiple objects in it, and even another empty object in it containing its own objects.
When I set the parent empty to be an asset and put it in a seen - everything is hidden, so blender ignores all children objects.
I can of course spend half of my life joining them together but is there some elegant way to make this work?
I was unable to manage this using collections as well.
Thanks
Oh sorry, never mind, you are talking about asset.
Hi,
Do you want to keep the objects separated? If not then joining them is quite easy. Select all objects and hit CTRL + J. Just make sure you have one object active.
Parenting makes the child objects move, rotate and scale with the parent object but they are not really contained in the parent object.
If you want to keep the objects separated using a collection is the way to go, but it has its own quirks. When adding a collection from the asset browser you have to hit CTRL + A → Make instances real to convert the instanced collection to regular objects. You also need to redo the parenting and adding objects to a collection. So it’s not perfect.
What problems you had with the collection method? You need to make sure you add all the objects into the collection, not just the parent emptys.
Yes, seems like there is no way to have parented objects in asset 
This means I have to reorganize the way every objects are created when I import them from say BlenderKit, this will take a lot of time and effort. This tells me that editing assets in general must be difficult.
Are you new to Blender?
The lack of collections in your screenshot suggests that you are new to Blender and don’t understand about Collections yet.
To make youre multi-object office chair an asset you have to put all of its parts into a single collection and mark the collection as an asset.
You often do not want to join everything together because various different modifiers on different objects would not cooperate and the only solution is to apply all modifiers which is often not desired.
The most commonly reported headache with Collections is that people think you have to build the asset around the world origin to have a sensible pivot point for the Collection Instances made from the asset. That is not the case. You can make it anywhere and tell the pivot point to be wherever you want it to be. I usually include an empty in the collection (it may or may not be used as a parent) explicitly for indicating where I want the pivot point to be located when I use the collection as a Collection Instance.
Deleted previous because I didn’t know how to use linked collections properly.
As thinsoldier says, put the items in a Collection and make the collection an asset. If you want to manipulate the linked objects in the new file, just pull the white collection out of the orange one to append it
