Asset Browser - Beginners Guide - Blender 3

the asset browser is a powerful tool where you can bring in previously made assets for example game objects or materials and drag and drop them into your scenes in this video i'm going to break down the asset browser which can be a little bit tricky to understand when you first try and use it so i'll be approaching it from a beginner's perspective and give a general outline along with some of the pitfalls that you might come up against if you like what i do then do check out my website and the playlist on this channel for more great content okay so i'm in the default general scene here my screencast keys are down the corner here and the asset browser is available in 3.0 so make sure you have the latest version of blender as tradition dictates i'll delete my default cube and shift 8 add mesh and monkey so there's a fantastic monkey head that i've made all by myself so i'm very proud of this and i want to be able to use it as an asset in other blender files and this of course can be any asset you've made so first of all we'll want to tell blender where to put our assets and you'll probably want to create a separate folder for that in order to do that we can go up to edit preferences and down to file paths and asset library here i put all my blender files into a blender folder and i've created an asset folder within that and you can of course choose that folder for yourself here create a new folder for your assets to go do make sure that's saved so you should have auto save preferences on by default with that ticked you can close it down so now i can save this wonderful monkey head that i've made in my asset browser to use nice and quickly in my other scenes to define this as an asset there's two simple ways i can come up to the outliner right click on it and mark as assets that's probably the easiest way and you can see it's got this sort of book icon here as if it's a library and within your library the other way is to go up to object and asset markers asset there you can of course clear your asset as well so now that i've done that let's take a look at the asset browser i'll just bring up this window here which is the timeline come across and change it to my asset browser there and you can see there's suzanne i can rename this as monkey i made and you can see it update in there and i'll just zoom out a touch and see that you can drag it in now and the great thing is it sticks to the floor like this it even sticks to objects as well so i can put it on my original monkey like so so it's a very powerful tool in that sense especially for things like a room where you've got tables and chairs and pictures to hang on the wall it's very effective i'll just delete that monkey now the problem is and this is the bit where it gets a bit confusing is that this is only in my current file this asset that i've got here so you can see current file there if i click on this drop down there's user library here if i click on that it isn't in there and that's the user library i set up hoping that my assets would go into well the problem is this blender file with the monkey in is not in that folder in my assets folder so blender can't see it and therefore bring it in from my assets folder however if i go to file save as and actually put it within my blender assets folder so i'll call this monkey asset and save it now you can see it suddenly appears in my user library so not only the current file just there but the user library as well so now let's go to file new bring up this window change it to the asset browser the current file has nothing in it but if i go to my user library there is my monkey that i can bring in to this new file so any asset that you want to use has to be saved in a blend file that's within your assets folder that's probably the most confusing thing and you'll want to play with that a little bit to get used to it what i would recommend is if you've got lots of separate files with different assets that you want to use i would append them all into one file and then save that within your assets folder and organize the assets that way you can also set up materials as well so if i go across the shading tab and i'll pull this out and i'll change this to the asset browser you'll want to press t to bring up the tools menu here let's create a material on this object so i'll create a very simple gold material so across the yellow metallic all the way up roughness all the way down and call it gold i can right click in the name and mark as asset or you can come across to slots right click there mark as asset or under the materials you can right click here marcus asset right click up here marcus asset so there's a lot of places you can mark your assets when they're materials so let's do that markers asset there's my gold material however this material will not appear in my user library have a quick think why that is that's because this blender file is not in my assets folder so file save as here's my asset folder and i call this materials and then i can put lots of materials in here and save them so save now you can see it jumped into my user library and i can start using it and i can click and drag it onto objects and you can see a golden monkey one last thing if i go to layout mode and delete the default cube and bring in another monkey so shift a mesh and then monkey i'm not using one of these because they're already an asset that i brought in so you can see this is suzanne and those are the monkeys i made myself if i rotate this around the x-axis as if it's sitting on the floor let's just go to side view and line that up so somewhere around there and i want to save this one as an asset so that it comes in with that rotation if i press n on my keyboard and go up to item you can see it's got some rotation there however i need to apply this rotation if i want this to come in sitting on the floor as it is instead of standing up like this for that i'll need to press ctrl a and apply the rotation now you can see this is all set to zero that means when i set this one as an asset let's do that now right click mark as asset monkey rotate now you can see that in my asset library when i click and drag it in you can see that it comes in with a rotation of zero as these ones have as well that's why you need to apply that rotation that you've made otherwise it will cancel it out when it brings it in so there you have it an introduction to the asset browser there's certainly more you can do with this but hopefully you can see from this what a powerful tool it can be and this takes away any confusion thanks for watching and i'll see you next time

Channel: Grant Abbitt

Views: 9,148

Keywords: understand, texture, paint, learn, blender, tutorials, 3d, art, graphics, game, material, guide, easy, painting, how to, gamedev, assets, game assets, asset browser, blender 3, blender 3.0, blender asset browser, simple, basic, blender tutorial, blender 3 tutorial

Id: 01jcDvHpOmY

Length: 6min 5sec (365 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 15 2021