Is there an easy way to create a Blender addon that allows users to drag and drop my custom materials and models into the 3D scene? I’ve created over 200 textures and it’s time-consuming to recreate the materials each time. I’m also working on models and want to streamline the process for myself and other artists. I plan to sell this addon on Blender Market. What’s the best approach to develop this type of addon?
I think it’s easier to use an Asset Library for that. It has built-in support for drag and drop for meshes, materials, modifiers, node groups, automatic or custom preview images etc.
What if i want to share them or sell them would it be easy to just install them into blender or they have to assign everything one by one
The best is that you look a bit into it to see for yourself.
But basically you have to make each material / model an asset, and this is going to be saved within the .blend.
Then users only needs to copy that .blend into their own asset folder.
The only thing that I’m not sure about is asset categories, I’m not sure if it’s possible to merge two different blender_assets.cats.txt, at least automatically.
IDK if there is a special technique to avoid loosing categories when adding a new .blend to an asset folder.
They’re easy to install, like @sozap said, you import all your assets (materials, meshes etc) into a blend file, select them, and ‘Mark as Asset’, this will put them into an ‘Unassigned’ category in the Asset Browser.
Then you can create your own categories and sub categories (e.g. category ‘Materials’ - sub-category ‘Metal’), you can add sub-sub-categories, and change the default image that is assigned to each.
I’m working on an asset library now that I’m planning to sell, and I’m importing everything into a single blend file, then using categories to organize it.
I also own asset libraries made by other users who chose to use multiple blend files, which helps if your assets or textures are really large, and doesn’t affect the user (other than reminding them to check that they have all the blend files installed).
I wrote an addon a few years ago that acted like an asset library, before the actual Asset Browser was introduced, adding procedural objects to the scene, and I feel like manually assembling an Asset Library is a better way to go.
If you want to go with Python you’d be coding your own drag and drop system, or just using buttons to spawn your objects into the scene, and making sure to select the object you want to add a material to before you click the add material button.
If everything fits into one blend file, then your users only have to install one thing, and they can drag and drop onto any object or surface in your scene, no buttons required.