You can check the list of suggested assets and leave suggestions here: T55239: Blender Assets Bundle
Note that Brushes will probably be included as part of a “Standard Asset Library”, which would basically be a part of Blender, not a separate download. That could easily hundreds of brushes. But that’s a bit of a separate (IMO high priority) project, together with rethinking brush management entirely. See Asset Browser Workshop Outcomes — Blender Developers Blog.
Since I am not seeing this talked about anywhere and my bug report got closed, I want to stress that shipping Pose Library as the only way to work with animations is not a great look. Right now you can’t even save a simple action as an actual animation and there is no tasks on a workboard for that.
Asset Browser should support full action animations, because poses are only a tiny use case, usable only on a single frame of animation in pose mode of an armature, yet it seems like most of dev time somehow went to it instead of making asset browser more feature complete.
I don’t think it’s necessary to pre-set a few g’s of assets, I suggest just plugging in the blender store and getting an account login to save the asset library index.
rest assure, they know what they are doing. They are preparing an asset bundle for the user to get started quickly not a full blown asset a library. It is very clearly stated on the blender wiki page
https://wiki.blender.org/wiki/Reference/Release_Notes/Blender_Asset_Bundle
The Blender Asset Bundle is meant to be a basic set of building blocks to get started, not a full blown asset library with thousands of large textures and heavy models.
Animations
As a user who make extensive use of animations, a better way of keeping track of animations is a major step forward for Blender. The asset browser is therefore IMO perhaps the most important new development in blender since 2.8. Blender is after all a tool for animation.
With many characters and each having many animations in one file, the current action editor drop down requiring scrolling to find and select an animation can be extremely tedious and is not very user friendly. (It’s also easy to forget to ensure at least a fake user, which can have bad consequences.) The NLA has been my main means of storing and managing animations and saving animations in individual files as part of the workflow.
Having played around with the asset browser in alpha, I would like to offer a short wish list as feedback. I realize that this is still under development and these may already be in the pipeline, TODO, or reserved for future updates:
Finally, I could not yet figure out how to save the assets in the (experimental) path specified under preferences for it. I tried a few different ways, but that directory remains empty. If it is indeed already implemented and I just have to read up somewhere on what to do to actually save the marked assets, then I hope it will be made more obvious.
Thanks for reading
DeX
Check the “Future Development” section of Pose Library v2.0 — Blender Developers Blog, where I explicitly describe this as planned for a future version.
A bug is something that’s implemented but not working well; if something isn’t implemented at all, it’s not a bug but a feature request, and it doesn’t belong on the bug tracker.
The first focus of the project is to get something that’s better than the old pose library, which:
These are all limitations that are lifted by the new asset-based pose library.
Are you asking that the pose library project is not put into Blender 3.0, and delayed until more features are ready to go in? I think it’s already an improvement over what Blender (2.93) has currently, and I don’t see this as a reason to delay its release further.
Pretty much every time a new feature X is added to Blender, there are people saying it’s impossible to use without also implementing Y. So far I think Blender is pretty useful. For example, the Blender Animation Studio has produced plenty of short films with just the pose-based library.
Update: don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the feedback. It’s just that there are very few developers available to work on this, and choices have to be made on what to implement first, and what to implement later. It’s simply impossible to do everything we want to do and have it part of Blender 3.0 as well.
@DeXoN A few things you point out will be solved by the new catalog system (linked above). The list view is a nice touch, I’ve forwarded it to @julianeisel who’s working on the UI.
Assets remain in the file they are defined in. Marking as asset is just that: it only adds a mark. It doesn’t magically copy things to some other place. If you want to have the assets show up in an asset library, make sure the blend file that contains them is saved to that asset library.
This is planned already:
First of all, thanks for the reply and sorry if the last message sounded offensive, didn’t mean it like that.
I am definitely not saying that you should scrap pose library 2.0 just because I personally won’t use it much.
What I actually meant is for future projects to adopt geo nodes development style, where at first widespread and more straight-forward use cases are developed for (as example scattering stuff in geo nodes could’ve been an action library to store animations in asset browser) and then you go deeper, building on the existing framework. It just felt to me like with pose library you guys went from 1 straight to 9, skipping the numbers in-between.
I read the post and saw the bit about animations snippets. I think why I didn’t pay attention to that is because snippet sounds more like a multi-frame pose than a full action.
Also, I agree with DeXoN that action datablock selector is so painful to work with that you can’t help but ask for asset browser to ease the pain a little.
@sybren Thank you for your response and clarification.
So, I see files with assets must be saved to the respective “Asset Libraries” file paths created under “File Path” preferences. Assets from the current file will not show up even if it is saved under that path, unless one chooses “Current File.”
It’s a little unorthodox, but I would find it extremely useful.
I guess my big question to the developers is what the thought process is behind requiring one to ‘mark assets’ at all? If I’m going to build a library of .blend files under an asset library path, then I would either create assets (animations, meshes, objects, armatures, materials…) from scratch, or delete/append whatever I need from working files into new files that would be saved to that path. Either way, to me the fact that it ended up in that path would be sufficient designation as an asset in a library. ‘Mark as Asset’ seems to be an unnecessary step for a redundant property. Moreover, would there be a way to instantly see from within blender if an asset has been marked or not, or is this a hidden property that one’d have to navigate to and somehow keep track of? Wouldn’t it be simpler and more slick to eliminate the ‘marked as asset’ property altogether, and just have everything inside .blend files under the asset browser paths be designated as assets automatically?
Thank you for pointing me in the right direction on how this works.
Sorry for off-topic but:
Date in topic is wrong or that meeting notes are from future.
This was explained here if I understand it correctly
Corrected, thank you.
It would be really nice to be able to save a 5 second video as the thumbnail.
This is the most common problem I see in every discussion about new Blender features. I wish someone could provide detailed numbers of the budget and workforce that Blender’s competitors have enjoyed over the last 23 years so I can make some graphs comparing their resources to Blender’s resources over the same time period. MAYBE then more people will be able to understand.
You can have a file with objects, meshes, materials, armatures, cameras & lights to render preview icons, a scene to put everything into, collections to organise the scene, and actions to do some animation tests. Blender wouldn’t know which of these datablocks would be assets (and thus be presented in the asset browser) and which are merely “helper” datablocks. This is why you need to mark specific datablocks as assets.
That would give a horrible mess.
Currently the preview image is just stored as in-memory bitmap (so really all pixel values, uncompressed). In order to support video, it would probably require a big refactor of the preview icon system to support compressed data, different kinds of data for different previews, etc.
You mean like People — blender.org ? It lists 2 Principal Engineers and 11 Blender Developers. Those are the people doing the majority of the development work. If you want the financial overview of 2020, take a look at Blender Foundation annual report 2020 — blender.org
I do think animated preview support is quite important to have, at least eventually. Right now I prefer the focus is on other things to get the Asset Browser in good shape for 3.0.
@sybren I fully understand that. Can we take this discussion offline?
@sybren and @julianeisel:
Would you be willing to have a brief zoom call with me on this topic tomorrow or Monday sometime? I’ve been testing the workflow and I think this is very important to get right.
This asset browser/library is in my humble opinion the most momentous blender development since v.2.8. I don’s say that lightly. Please see my profile. I’m very interested and would be willing to help with testing and feedback.
That might be tricky, given that you’re listed as being in the USA and we’re here in NL (and the pandemic and stuff).
Pop over to the #asset-project channel on Blender.Chat. There are already a lot of ideas that simply need time to get implemented, so it would be a shame to base our discussion on the current implementation (instead of the envisioned one).
Found the missing info.
What’s the current status of the asset bundle? 3.0 is already beta but not a sight of it.