Hello,
I think the process to tag Assets could be optimized for production use.
#1
Adding a tag is slow : you need to click the “+”, then double-click the tag to be able to type
Possible solution : automatically select/highlight the created tag to allow user to type directly
#2
Adding several tags is slow : in the current implementation, adding 10 tags would require 30 clicks + 20 mouse movements + 20 hand switches between mouse/keyboard
Possible solution : allow the user to input several tags at once separated by commas (ie. “architecture, interior, furniture, sofa, couch, italian, leather, 3 seater”
#3
Applying tags to several assets is slow : there is no way to reuse previous tags, or copy tags between assets
Possible solution A : add an operator to copy all Tags from an Asset as a list with commas, and allow user to paste that in another Asset (as proposed in #2)
Possible solution B : allow for tag-linking using ctrl+L (as already implemented for Materials in the viewport)
Possible solution C : implement an autocomplete based on previous tags when user is typing
The tag workflow is indeed in a bare minimum state at this point, I’d be happy to see some improvements. But it’s something that we’ll have to leave up to the community, which I hope to see more involved in Asset Browser development now that the basics are there. The “core” Asset Browser team working at the Blender Institute tries to focus more on the high-level, strategical parts of the project meanwhile.
We don’t usually do this elsewhere in Blender, except in the File Browser. But in a way I agree this would be useful.
You can actually do it much faster by first adding say 10 tags, renaming the first one and then using tab to jump to editing the next ones. I don’t think it gets much faster than that, but it’s also not very discoverable. We could mention it in a tooltip.
The idea of the comma separated list is also nice, although it has the same discoverability problem. I’d be fine with either one of them or even both.
This for me is probably the highest priority thing to address regarding tags, because otherwise using tags in complex environments or even production environments isn’t really manageable (without scripting at least). We could allow things like easily copy & pasting of all tags, doesn’t even need to be a comma-separated list. But to me this is the waters of multi-item editing. So the first step would be to support Copy to Selected for tags.
Basically, this isn’t that complicated to improve, and I see a number of things we could do. But personally I don’t have the time to work on designs, probably not even on the implementation. So again, I hope the community can step up here.
I’ve got a number of ideas on how to improve the assets browser. I’ll check out ⚓ T54642 Asset Project: User Interface, as well as the suggestions here and put together a design / todo and start plugging away at them.
For instance, I’d love to be able to select a bunch of objects, and apply a material in one click. Things like that that would greatly improve the workflow.
Question for you Julian: What are your thoughts on having the ability to see all of the elements that are in the blend file in this browser? For instance all the materials that are in the blend file, regardless of if they’ve been marked as an asset, would be easy to manage (create, edit, delete). I think blender needs something like this, but not sure as to whether y’all have considered if that should be here or in another tab / panel. The asset browser makes it so easy to see what you’re working with already, that I could see people adding all of their materials in a file to the asset browser, just so that they could see them better. So instead what if everything was in there already (in your current file), and you could mark whether or not they would be available to other files. Thoughts?
I updated T94192 with some ideas of how this could work on a more granular level! I forgot to address linking tags, which I’m not familiar with how that works under the hood. I’m not familiar with how much of anything works under the hood TBH haha. I’ll do some research on that and see how it could fit in
Just following up on this in regards to your thoughts to my questions above, in terms of either expanding the asset browser to allow for general element browsing, or whether that should be something separate we could design and implement. I’ll be working next week to get together a design for the tag improvements requested above and outlined in my post in the related task. Hope you’re doing well.
