For me personally, adding the assets to the asset browser really speeds up the thumbnail generation. I find it therefore a more pleasant experience, not to mention there’s the choice to link or append assets. With linking, it is indeed not possible to change the seasons currently.
I did a test with duplicating (unlinked) the assets in their source file, this effectively quadruples the file size. But, it would allow for season changes. This then applies to 228-is files and is a big deal. Though mesh data could remain linked, while material data is changed for each object. That would reduce the file size significantly. Will have to test that tomorrow.
On the other hand, I can see using only the summer asset in the asset browser and use the N-panel to change seasons in the material’s properties with the press of a button. So, if that could be implemented, it may not be as intrusive.
Can’t the modifiers be added on top of an (linked) asset with the press of a button from the N-panel as well? Maybe it is not possible for linked assets, but it should be for appended assets, right?
So what I would propose is the option to move the assets to the asset browser — which may be stored on a different disc or even in cloud storage — and remove the preview panel from the N-panel. In theory, I think that would be doable. And, I think it is more future proof, considering people will eventually consolidate their assets in the asset browser anyways.
Also, I noticed that the assets are bundled with a texture folder for each asset, even though some assets share these textures. Maybe, removing the duplicates can help mitigate the increased disc use for duplicating assets?
So I am thinking about batch processing the assets through Python. I have never done anything with Python before, so I may need a little help here and there.
Sofar, I have created a script that duplicates the asset 3 times and link the mesh data. Then, I want to rename the Mesh and Material data to be the same as the asset’s name (and to use the material name as suffix). I asked for some help on this and will post the progress here tomorrow.
This should result in the following naming scheme:
Vine_plant_2_Summer
> Mesh: Vine_plant_2
>> Material 01: Vine_plant_2_leaf_Summer
>> Material 02: Vine_plant_2_trunk_Summer
Vine_plant_2_Winter
> Mesh: Vine_plant_2
>> Material 01: Vine_plant_2_leaf_Winter
>> Material 02: Vine_plant_2_trunk_Winter
All I need to do next is change the shader properties according to the seasons. @blender_now how did you to this in the code? Could you help me with a few lines to change the shader properties for each of the assets? Considering I should be able to get the season as suffix for the object, that should be doable, right?
As for adding support for the Asset Browser: I am still looking for a way to change the shader properties for the objects with a script. Thusfar, I managed to duplicate the assets, link the mesh data and rename the objecs to have a suffix for each season. But do you know how I could change the material’s season properties as part of a script? I will try to write it out in English for what I want to achieve:
For material: [Asset name_ ] leaf [ Winter], change the material properties so that the leaves are set to winter in the shader. I have added "Asset name" as prefix to the material slots and added the “_Season” as suffix. This also tackles the problem that there can only be one type of season for each asset in the blend file.
If I can get that to work, I can batch process the assets for the asset browser and so could other users of the addon. At least, this would give us the option to use the asset browser, because I am personally quite disappointed that it takes a lot of effort to manually process the Vegetation addon’s assets for the Asset Browser.
I really hope you could help me with this!
PS: Sorry, I couldn’t send this to you privately over the forum.
hello,
I appreciate your efforts. but I’m not a developer, so I couldn’t help you. I will discuss it with him at the time of the next update. thank you for your suggestions.
Best regards
By the way, there’s the script thusfar for batch processing assets to the asset browser. It can be expanded quite a lot, so I thought anyone interested might have a go at it.
import bpy
#Duplicate objects and link mesh data
bpy.ops.object.select_all()
bpy.ops.object.duplicate(linked=False, mode='TRANSLATION')
bpy.ops.object.duplicate(linked=False, mode='TRANSLATION')
bpy.ops.object.duplicate(linked=False, mode='TRANSLATION')
bpy.ops.object.select_all(action='SELECT')
bpy.ops.object.make_links_data(type='OBDATA')
#Purge
bpy.ops.outliner.orphans_purge()
#Rename
name = bpy.context.active_object.name
parts = name.split(sep = '.')
name = parts[0]
bpy.data.objects[name + '.001'].name = name + '-Spring'
bpy.data.objects[name + '.002'].name = name + '-Summer'
bpy.data.objects[name + '.003'].name = name + '-Autumn'
bpy.data.objects[name].name = name + '-Winter'
@blender_now is it still possible to consider an option in the general settings to move the assets to another location other than Blender add-ons folder?
Yeah, I still hope they will do something to improve this add-on.
At the moment, it’s just sitting on my archive, unused. The fact that I can’t move the assets, and above all, the issue with the assets being appended, and not linked, makes it unusable for me.
It’s not a cheap add-on, I hope the devs will be more responsive to the users requests.
Same here. It’s also quite the oversight that you can only have one season of a particular asset in a file. How about multiple scenes for different seasons?
Hi,
I was recently using Vegetation addon, it has superb quality!
Neverthless, adding an option to link trees would be welcomed, because animation in archviz are a fraction of our work, so that additional button for linking would be great.
Other things that are missing for me:
possibility to migrate package to another place on other drive (my SSD is quite old, with 128GB it was nearly impossible to install addon that has more than 14GB)
more vegetation: birch tree, low groving conifers like bog pine, siberian carpet cypress, fescue plant
hello,
thank you for the feedback.
you are right, in the next version, in addition to the new vegetation assets, we will add the possibility of linking the assets.
you can also choose the location on your hard drive to install the library
Do you mind if I ask about how tree’s shader works? I don’t understand why some of trees leafs are translucent, some are opaque. Is there a possibility to turn off those half transparent leafs? They are making an enitre image a little bit off because leafs aren’t half transparent, they should be more like a two sided plane (green side and lighter green/yellowish side).
Also, I’ve noticed that there’s some grey dots around hickory leafs in alpha channel.
just set the “random season” shader to 0.
it is a node that allows you to turn off certain leaves in the spring when there are fewer leaves.
for the hickory leaf, add on rgb curve after the opacity map and contrast the image for solve the problem. I will update this image in the next version, thanks for reporting this problem
Vegetation V5 has arrived! The Professional Addon for nature and plants. Discover a large library of trees, shrubs, rocks, garden plants, stump, tropical plants and more. Over 260 assets and over 900 variations. Create photorealistic 3D nature scenes in just a few clicks with the Vegetation Addon for Blender.
