Perhaps an obvious answer that I’m not seeing, but is there a way to have roughness maps as individual assets? I have a collection of surface imperfection maps (scratches, fingerprints, etc.) that sometimes I just want to drag in and apply to the current material node setup. Would be handy if in the same way I can drag and drop a material asset onto an object I could drag and drop an individual texture file into the node setup.
I know this functionality basically already exists directly from the windows folder into the blend file, but would be nice to have the files/thumbnails grouped into the asset browser. I could create materials of just the roughness map and mark them as assets but then I wouldn’t be able to drag them into the existing node setups.
Hi. Not quite sure what you mean by separate assets. You can drag-and-drop any image supported by Blender inside the Material Node Editor and it should automatically create an Image Texture node with that image automatically selected for its image data-block as well. After which you only need to manually link to the base color input socket of whatever node you’re hoping to use it for.
An image can dragged from any of these windows:
OS - File Viewer (File Explorer on Windows - Finder on Mac, etc)
Blender - File Browser Editor.
Blender - Asset Browser Editor (as you mentioned already).
Hi, thanks for the reply. What I’m after is option 3, how do I get individual image files into the asset browser so that I can drag them directly from the asset browser into the shader editor?
You need to setup one or more asset libraries in your User Preferences Editor. The path should be to the directory where your textures reside in on your hard-drive.
But I still then need to mark the textures as assets to get them to appear in the browser, and marking individual textures as assets doesn’t appear to be an option.
The internal file browser Modron suggested is what I’ll have to go with, it just means splitting the asset browser to accommodate the file browser window as well, not the end of the world just wanted to make sure I wasn’t missing something.
I may not understand you correctly, but if you want roughness maps, ie., smudges, imperfections, and so, I have three options in mind.
1, you create a seamless procedural texture, and you bake it. It is possible, but may be too much of a hassle, you can simply use a node group inside Blender.
2, you do the same procedural setup, but won’t bake at all, just create a node group, and append on your works, then seams won’t be a concern in this sense, you can do whatever you like.
3, still procedural, you create a gradient circle, and add smudges in there (like an alpha brush kinda thing), so you can both bake it and just position it where you want.
Of course, if a BW image, you can use the same method to create bump or displacement stuff, as mentioned, also for sculpting
After some research, it appears that Blender’s asset browser doesn’t support Images, only actions (poses), materials, objects & worlds; my mistake. However, you can still click-and-drag Materials that use Images as assets. Personally, I’m betting that Blender intentionally left out the function to mark images as assets to prevent the loading of 8k+ textures that some beginners (and advanced) users love to use, as it would raise the value of VRAM quite high in Blender.
