A serious need for Assets browsing & Material library

It is around 2 years now since I started with Blender. I started out in 3DS, but because of the high price on that software, I went to modo. Modo is great but a crappy renderer, and are getting to expensive as well.

Both this program had a very decent assets browser and material library. This is something I was chocked not to find in this fantastic peice of software. I read that this will be in place sometimes this year, so I hoped they will priority this.

Nextgen shader tools startet out great, but for some reason it seem to be dead. So come on guys.

Asset browsing
Blender already allows to make complicated shots with a lot of linking in of data from other .blend files. It’s quite abstract and basic still though.

What we need is to expose this functionality much better to the user, including adding tools and new paradigms to manage this well.

An editor is going to be made to manage all of this linking, re-using, appending, allowing revisions or ‘level of detail’ versions and to manage preset assets and asset libraries in general.

Working on it: Bastien Montagne
Likely to happen in 2015: 98%

It will happen, feel free to help development with coding if you really want it in.

Thanks for the reply doublebishop. Help with coding? hmm…well I would gladly do that if I knew anything about it. Yeah I saw it also that this will happen in 2015, but it should have been in place long time ago. Max f.eks had this 15-20 years ago. I understand that there is a lot of work involved, but why in the earth have they not worked on this before now. To all of you that have contributed to the development of Blender, you have and you are doing a fantastic work.

You could always help with testing and giving feed back. The developer opened a thread for people to test early stage experimental builds. His thread is a few post down from yours

That’s strange, I find Modo’s renderer to be splendid! Great results, albeit a bit slow unfortunately. Everything else is Modo is awesome, it’s just a bit behind other programs in terms of features as it’s a somewhat new player in the field.

I feel you on this one,

I’m glad they’re working on this.

Well is not to bad, but compare it to cycles eller vray. Modo render produce unclear images, a little foggy. But I respect your opinion.

Blender was my first 3d package, so i didn’t miss having an asset browser right away… but soon enough i started wondering the same thing as you. how could something so indispensable be ignored all these years? Even with my elaborate folder structures, it’s a big headache trying to locate my assets sometimes.

It’s probably cos all the blender movies up until this point had a relatively low number of assets. Sometimes, you gotta go full scale to see the whole picture

I hope this redcurrant thing makes it to blender soon… and works …with BI too :smiley:

Concerning Materials, textures, lights and worlds, something is already there in dev version of Blender: http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Dev:Ref/Release_Notes/2.74/More_Features


It’s on the calendar for 2015, hold your horses.

My favorite is the asset browser in UnrealEngine. Works just the way I like.

I was just asking about this :smiley: