2025-02-17 Design: Online Assets & Story Tools

Meetings
1

Design: Online Assets & Story Tools

Attendees:

  • Dalai Felinto
  • Francesco Siddi
  • Pablo Vazquez
  • Sybren Stüvel (Online Assets)
  • Falk David (Story Tools)

Online Assets

After the latest online asset meeting there were some questions raised regarding the relation between extensions and asset libraries.

In the August 2024 design blog-post it was proposed to split asset libraries from extensions.

This was re-considered in this meeting, and arrived to the following conclusions:

  • Nothing changes for the initial milestones:
    • Remote asset libraries will be be added directly from the Asset Libraries user interface.
    • Remote asset libraries are treated indepedently of the Extensions system.
  • In a later milestone an Asset Library (*) can be turned into an Extension.
    • The Extensions Listing will then contain:
      • Assets.
      • Themes.
      • Asset Libraries (*).
  • Both systems should be able to co-exist.
  • Having Asset Library as an extension doesn’t mean that the Blender Extensions will host user asset libraries.
    • The extensions platform should be able to leverage this design to serve all Blender Foundation-curated asset libraries via the Extensions platform.
    • What kind of user submitted content will be supported in the official platform is a separate discussion and tabled for later.
    • Self-hosting of extensions will always be possible.

(*) - Note that the Asset Library is what will become an extension, not its individual assets.

Story Tools

See main design task.
Read the full summary by Falk.

New Data-block and Naming

  • Remove Timeline editor #131102 (see Playback).
  • Rename Sequence to Timeline data-block.
  • Make sure it supports nesting.

Playback

  • Playback needs to be context sensitive.
  • Add playback footer in animation editors.
  • Playback footer in the VSE.

Operators

To see if rendering (Image/Animation/Audio) could always takes the current frame from the Timeline.

To render via the command-line could give separate options to whether render the frame relative to the active Scene or the active Timeline (the new data-block, not the editor).

Workflow

The editorial process during storyboarding.

  • Work mainly with scenes local to the .blend file.
  • Once editorial is approved, external .blend files are created on a per-shot basis, which re-populates the timeline.

Mockups (to do)

  • Timeline in Blender header (Falk did one already, but it can be expanded to show the rest of Blender).
    • Also add the timeline data-block in the VSE header.
  • Playback footer in the VSE.
  • [Scene | Timeline] toggle in the VSE?
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