Blender 3.0 - Learn how to set and use the New Asset Browser

hey everybody it's pete from myjurybunch.com today what i want to do is spend a little time discussing one of the long-awaited features to blender that for those of us who have been using blender for years and years and years have been dying to get and that's a working blender asset library system where we can add objects to a library file and then import those into new projects as we're working with them so i'm going to go over everything you need to know about it today and how to use it and let's get started and of course while you're here check out my channel there you're going to find a whole lot of playlists and videos covering clock repair watch repair jewelry designs your repair and other things 3d printing getting ready for casting things like that so if you're not a subscriber please consider subscribing to my channel and if you like this video by the time you watch it hit the like button because it does help my channel grow thanks a lot and let's get started okay so when you open up blender you're going to get the splash screen here you're going to get your new blender file however you have your default blender settings set up for instance this is how i have mine so all the add-ons that i use are over here on the end tab i do use quite a few of the add-ons both paid and free add-ons for my modeling purposes so just keep that in mind your screen may not look exactly like mine but we're not going to cover any add-ons today we're only going to be covering basically how to use the library system to do this is very simple what we're going to do is actually create a couple of blender files and a folder system for our libraries or our blender asset library files so that we can go back and use those blender files for specific things it's not complicated it is a little involved to get set up but once you have it set up it's very easy to work with and there are a couple of things that you're going to have to remember when using the asset library system when you create a library file which is basically a blender file and you save it in your libraries folder and you link it to the library section when you're working with a new project you cannot add objects from the new project you're working on into your library the only way to add objects into your existing libraries will be to actually open up those library files either create or add objects to that particular file and then save it and we're going to cover all that today so what i have basically is a brand new blender file there's no file name up here at the top so we know it's a brand new file and what i'm going to do is basically save this blank project as a new blender library file and to do this i'm going to i'm going to show you how i would create categories on my system and it's basically using your file structure whether it's on a pc or a mac i just happen to be using a on apple today to do this but if it's the same working with a macintosh or a pc just different keys if you use shortcuts so let's talk about that i am actually going to go to the file menu come down to save as and what i want to do is i want to create this particular or create a new blank project to become one of my libraries and here you can see i have untitled blender right here or untitled.blend i'm actually going to put this on a spare c or spare hard drive called ssd small because it's just one of the hard drives i had and i want to create a new folder on my hard drive i'm going to call this blender asset library and i am going to hit save so that we've created that new library and that takes me into that particular folder so in that blender as that library folder on my hard drive there are no files now i don't necessarily want to create multiple files in this this is basically going to be a file cabinet to hold other files or other folders so what i'm going to do is create another folder and we're going to call this shapes and i will press enter and now i'm going to create another folder and i'm going to call this let's call this furniture and press enter and now this particular file that i want to save i'm going to save it as a shapes folder file so it'll call it shapes.blend or shapeslibrary.blend so i'm going to come over to the shapes folder that i created i'm going to rename this from untitled to shapes library dot blend and i'm going to hit save as and now we've basically created a new file just for shapes pretty simple to do that but there's also one more thing we have to do we have to tell blender where to go find all the library files that we create to do that we're going to go to the edit menu come down to preferences i'm going to drag my preference screen over to the middle here i'm just going to make this a little bit bigger so with that selected here i've got my interface here and now i've got to come down to file paths and you can see i have no directories or no links to a directory or files that can be used as libraries just yet we have to add those to add those it's as simple as clicking this little plus button so i'll click that it'll bring open a file explorer or open windows system we're going to migrate to our small hard drive i'm going to open up the folder for the blender asset library and i am going to hit shapes and we're going to open that just double click it and then hit add asset to library okay now i'm going to call this particular link i'm going to call this link shapes now remember this word here is just a link to this particular location on our hard drive which is going to reference that file or that shapes library.blend file now we also have one that we want to create for furniture i'm going to actually create that link right now even though we don't have a file in it so i'll hit the plus sign i'm going to go back one i'm going to click on my furniture open that up and i'm going to hit add asset library which is basically creating a link to this folder and that link to the folder for our purposes is going to be called furniture and now i will come over to the save option just to make sure it's saved and save that now we can close our preferences so here is our blank library that we've created and i know it's our library because if you look at the top it says shape library dot blend so this is going to be the blender file where i put all of the shapes that i want to include in this library file or all the shapes that i'll use as a library if you don't understand it don't worry i'm going to explain it to you now so i've got a cube here and that it of course is one of our shapes so i'm actually going to open up my uh or create a new window and to do to create a new window in your 3d viewport just move your mouse to the lower left corner you'll see it changes to a plus sign click and hold the left mouse button and drag up you can see it creates a brand new 3d viewport right here that's not what we want we want to change this viewport to something else now if you're not familiar with blender you have options you can come over here and change this window to be any one of these particular things for instance if i wanted a timeline now i've got a video timeline for animations if i want a compositor i've got a compositor here if i want a an image editor i've got my image editor here what we want to do is come over and select asset browser so now this is the asset browser system for our user interface and you can see right now it's representing the current file or whatever current file i'm working in which is actually the blender or the shapes library.blend but i'm going to be more specific i'm just going to make sure i've got shapes selected so i've got that done and i've referenced the shapes folder where my shapes blender or my my shapes library.blend file is located and it's called shapes and what we have here is a cube and now i want to take this cube and i actually want to add it to my library within this blender file again i'm working in the library.blend file itself i'm not working outside of that so i'm going to come over here and we know this is called a cube we're going to leave it called the cube i'm going to come over and right click on it come down to mark as asset and what this will do is it will change the little icon over here to a library icon and it will add it to our library as whatever this name is cube that works pretty well now i'm going to take this cube and i'm going to move it and now i'm going to come over and add in a new shape and i'm going to add in a sphere so add mesh come down to let's say uv sphere it's going to leave that the way it is and we'll leave it called a sphere and again i'm going to add this as an asset so i'll mark it as an asset and you can see now it's added the sphere to our assets okay so let's take this and move it away because i don't need it anymore and we're going to add in a couple more shapes so shift a come over add a cone there we go we've got cone and i'm going to come over and hit right click on that and mark it as an asset so now i've got three shapes in here and just because i can i'm going to add one more so shift a and let's go and add in a taurus and you know just so i can show you something i want to change the name of this i don't want to leave it as a taurus i can come over here double click it and i can call it donut so now i have this object on my viewport that's called donut and i'm going to right click on it come down to marcus asset and now you can see i've got cone cube donut and sphere you can see that blender automatically sorts these by alphabet so everything is alphabetized here you really can't sort these out but you can filter them and i'm going to show you in just a minute how we can filter them now remember i'm actually working in the library file i'm not working on a blank project or a new project i'm working on only modifying my library.blend file in this case the shapes library.blend file so i've got these particular shapes here i'm going to add in another cube but we're going to change this to a rectangle so i'm going to do shift a mesh cube and i'm going to size this along the z axis about like that let's change the name to rectangle and again i'm going to add this to my library mark as an asset and there again it puts it right there and i'm just going to move it over just so it's out of the way doesn't have to be you don't have to move these in any particular order however if you're going to spend a lot of time making objects within your library file you know you can select these press the h key and hide them then come over here and do the same with those two press the h key and hide and then when i'm all done i can press alt h to bring them all back now i'm going to come over and i'm going to save this and if you noticed i've made all these changes to my blend file but i haven't saved it yet so what i want to do is find my file menu which i'll move that down file save and now it's updated our shapes library.blend file denoted by the little pop-up here in the bottom of the screen okay so that's all done and now let's say i want to categorize them by making them just a little bit easier to work with it's not difficult i can come over here and you can see i have all which would be all the objects in my library file or all the objects located in this blender file and unassigned unassigned means that they haven't been categorized yet so now i want to make some categories so i'm going to come over here i'm going to hit the plus sign there and you can see it says catalog and what i'm going to do is i'm going to come over here and i'm going to say cubes as one category and now i'm going to go over and add in another one by pressing the plus sign i'll double click the word catalog and type in spheres and let's just say one more and we'll call this cones now you'll see these little stars here on the side of the words and that denotes that we have not saved or made any changes to this file since we created these categories don't worry we're going to get to that point let's come back to the all so that i've selected all the objects that are currently in my library project and now i can drag some of these over so the sphere i'm going to drag into the spheres i'm going to take the cube and move that into cubes i'll take the rectangle and i'll also move that into cubes and we'll take the cone and we'll move that into cone so if i come over to all these are still all the objects in my system if i click on the cubes you can see there's only two objects that i've categorized as cubes one as a sphere and one as a cone and then as far as uncategorized objects i still have the donut and it's not applied to any different category i'm just going to expose all of them and now to get rid of these little stars what we have to do is basically update this file by saving it i'll go to file save it'll save the changes and you'll see the stars go away mean meaning that our library file is written now one thing to remember when you're modifying your library files or the files that you're going to use as asset libraries if i delete this object here it's also going to delete it here so for instance i'm going to highlight this cone i'm going to press the x key to delete it and you'll see it has disappeared from our library or things that we can use in other projects again if i select cones it's gone i'm going to press ctrl z or command z depending on what computer you're using i'm just going to put that back because i don't want to do that just to make sure i'm gonna hit file save and there we have it we've created a library of shapes which is pretty cool now one more thing we can do while we're editing our library is if i want to create materials for this i can create them here now or i can come back and edit later and basically what i'm going to do is show you how to come back and edit them later so that we know how to do that now i also created a link to a library called furniture however there is no blender file associated with that particular library to do that i'm going to come over to the file and then press new and then general and create a brand new blender file and i'm going to save this blunder file this blank blender file as my furniture library.blend asset library so to do this i've got this blank project here i'll go to file save as i'm going to migrate my way to that library directory and you can see here's my shapes folder and my furniture folder i'm going to go into furniture and we'll call this file furniture library dot blend and then i'll save that and now i've created a library for furniture now i don't have any furniture so we're going to actually go make a piece of furniture to work with and i'll actually do two so that we have two objects in our furniture category and all i'm doing right now is creating the library folders so let's not get too far ahead of ourselves just remember right now i'm working with the library folders what i want to do is turn this object into a table so what i'm going to do is go to my view port and i'm going to look at this from the side i'm going to bring this up so that it's on the z-axis right on the zero location on the bottom i'm going to right-click on that object set let's see what i want to do is set the origin to the 3d cursor and that's working good for me i'm going to press tab i'm going to grab i'm going to use the face tool i'm basically just doing a little bit of modeling here i'm going to extrude size size that up extrude zz and i'm going to bring that up and now i've got this cool little table it's you know whatever it looks like it's not the prettiest little table but we're going to we're going to leave it as a table and i'm going to rename this from cube to table well what i want to do now because i'm working in my furniture library is add this to the furniture library itself to do that we're going to do the exact same thing we did with our shapes i'm going to come over here i'm going to pull up the screen i'm going to change this to the asset browser i'm going to make sure that i'm working on the furniture library and now i can come over here select my table right click on it and add it or mark it as an asset and there it is it's located in our assets just like so now i'm done with the table i'm going to move that over and i'm going to make a simple little chair very easy to make a chair i will take a cube shift a uh let's see we'll come over to cube and what we want to do is make a new chair out of this and i'm just going to keep this real simple guys i don't really care what the chair looks like i'm just using it as reference so i'm going to go into edit mode i'm going to grab this particular face using the face tool right here i'm going to extrude that along the y axis just like so and then i'm going to grab this particular face i'm going to extrude that on the z axis and just to make sure that i'm going straight up just like so i'm going to press tab and there is our rudimentary very ugly chair but we're just going to change the name to chair and i will right click on that mark it as an asset and now the chair is in our asset library we have not saved it yet so we'll go to file and we will save and remember we're saving or we're working in our furniture library.blendfile this is the file that we linked as a library file that we can use in other projects okay so now that i've got that done now i want to create a brand new project to do that i'm going to file new general and i've created a brand new project so in this particular project i'm going to get rid of my cube because i don't need it but i want to grab some of the assets that we used in our asset system and what i can do is come over here bring up my asset browser and oops let's get that in the right place asset browser and now i want to bring in let's say i want to bring in a piece of furniture so i've got my asset library here and it is my furniture library i can come over and i can drag this table right into my viewport there it is how perfect is that and now in my scene i also want to add in a chair and to do that i can just drag in a chair just like so now the cool thing is when i do that i have several options here that when i link or bring in these objects from this particular remember these libraries or these objects are in a separate blender file and we're just linking to that blender file but i have several ways to bring those in if i click this little down arrow you can see i have link append and append by reusing data so let me explain to these to you what these three things do link will actually take that same chair and link it to this file which means anytime i make a change in my library file to that chair it will change every other project or every other scene that i have a chair in automatically which could work for you could not work because i like to have different types of furniture so i may not want that if i select append it will actually create another object of this chair with no linking to the original file so it just brings in that object like we're importing it and it links it to no other object within our scene so no other object within our scene would have the same data or properties as that chair and if we link by appending reused data for instance if i grab this chair and i bring it over here and i rotate this along the z axis so now i've got a chair here and i'm just going to bring this chair and move it over to the other side of the table when i reuse the data what that does is it actually keeps most of the data structures the same for both of these chairs as if they were just one chair so for instance if i come over here and i change the color of that chair by creating a new property for it i'll make this red you can see both objects are now red because they're sharing the same data structure that may not be what you want so just keep in mind with reused data they're going to share a lot of the data features and without the just by appending that object if i grab in another object here i rotate that r z and i rotate that on the z axis you can see it does not share the same data as the original two so so for instance by doing that you can see when i change the color of this one share if i want to go to red it changes both of them if i change this particular one i'll make that blue and i'll just select blue here you can see it's not changing it because they're all sharing the same data which is not helpful to me because i do want this to change and it's not changing but that's how you would control your objects by linking them in for now i'm just going to use reuse data and i'll deal with it later so that's how i work with that now let's say i want to take an object from one of my other libraries and put it onto the tabletop and i'm going to make this table brown so i'm going to add in a new color let's make this brown just because we can that looks good i come over and i'm going to select my shapes library and lo and behold there's all our shapes let's come over to cones there's our cone and one cool feature is when i drag this cone over you can see it puts a little grid on top of the table as to denote where it's going to place the object which is kind of clever and i'll put that right in the center and now i've created this little decoration on the top of my desk now i want to actually create some more materials in my shapes file or my shapes library file so for instance if i create a material here and i well i want to create a new material so i'll come over to i'm going to click off my scene i'm going to delete everything here because we don't need it i'm going to create a new material we'll call this material brown again i'm going to change the color to a brownish color and you can see it's we're working on that table here i can also take my material add it to a library by right clicking on it and then marking it as an asset but remember i'm not in an asset file i'm actually working right now on my demo project so i'm going to go and do a file save as and i'm just going to put this on my desktop and we'll call this demo.blend i already have one we'll just overwrite it so now let's say i want to add in some other things into my library now you can add just about anything you want you can add characters rigging colors materials shapes anything you want you can add to your asset library as long as it can exist within a blender file it can be added as a library asset so keep that in mind well to do that i can't do it from here so i can't create this this color and now add it to my materials here i can mark it as an asset but if i mark it as an asset it's going to mark it as an asset on my particular current demo file not on my library so i need to add this brown color to my library so how do i do that very simple let's edit our library file so i'm actually going to add the materials i'm going to add several materials to our shapes library so i'm going to go over and i'm going to open that file again so open reason we'll go down to shapes library.blend i'm going to not save the demo file and here you can see is our original shapes library.blend file where i added in all of these shapes let's create a new charac a new catalog or a new category called materials and now materials has a little star next to it which means we have not saved anything into it don't worry we're going to do that in just a second so if i want to create a new material for my asset library to use in other projects while i'm editing my library file i can come over to my materials i can create a new material and i'm going to call this matte wood color and we'll change the color to brown just like so and now i'm going to right click on this i'm going to mark it as an asset and if i come over to all you can see there it is we've got this matte wood color marked as an asset in our library we haven't saved it yet so let's go and do a couple more i'm going to hit plus i'm going to create a new material and we're going to call this matte green and i'm going to change the color to dark green just because i like dark green and then we will make that an asset and we click on here you'll see matt green appears on our asset library tab sheet and now i can take these two objects you can highlight them and just drag them into materials and now i have two objects in my materials tab and i'm gonna actually create one more we're gonna come over here we're gonna hit the plus sign i'm gonna call this new we'll double click it matte red for material red i'm gonna change the color of course to red i'm going to darken that up just a little bit and then we will right click on it mark it as an asset and go over to all and i can take that and drop it into my materials catalog so if i come over here there's the three materials now i'll save my shapes library.blend file and once it's saved the star will go away and now the colors the materials the objects are all in that one blender file and we're using that blender file as our library assets holder so let's go back to our demo file so i'm going to go back i'm going to open up my demo file and here you can see we've got a table which is brown we've got a cone which has no color we've got two chairs that are red i'm going to come down here and make sure that we've got our shapes selected as the library that we're currently using i'm going to select the materials and now i'm going to take this matte wood color i'm going to drag that over the table you see it changes the color of the table let's just change the cone oh actually we're going to change the color of the chairs to green and because they are sharing the same data both of them changed and we'll make this little cone red so there we go that's how you would use materials in here so that's simple and then i can switch back and forth depending on what library i want to work with if i want to bring in another table i can select all here and just drag in another table actually i'm going to append it without any data copying so now i can make this table we go back to our shapes select our green material i'll make that table green and there is our new demo project that i can save by itself where we've been able to use our assets to bring in and apply materials to again guys you can do this with materials shapes anything you create rigging poses any object in blender can now be added to your library file all you have to do is remember that your library files are blender files that you are using to as a library placeholder so any changes you make or any add-ons that you want to make to a library file you will have to go open up that library file and modify it or add to it and i will show you one more time what i mean if i come over here to if i want to add a piece of furniture to my furniture library i'm actually going to have to i'm going to save this demo project i'm going to open up my furniture library you can go to file open and go browse for it if it's in your reasons just open up furniture library.blend this is the library object that i have in that library file and what i want to do now is i'm going to drag this table out of the way because we don't want it there let's grab this table let's move it out of the way and i'm going to make a little lamp just so we have a little lamp here and to do that a simple little thing to do i'm going to hit shift a i'm going to add in a circle and i'll press tab all f and now to make a lamp this is pretty easy extrude zz i'm going to bring that up i'm going to size that down extrude zz i'm going to bring that up size that down extrude zz uh let's actually make that a little taller just about like that extrude size bring that out a little bit extrude zz and i'll bring that down then i'm going to size that then i'm going to extrude z z we're going to bring that up extrudes easy we're going to bring it up again just about like that size just about like so and now i've got this basically a small shape of a lamp and i want to take this i'm going to name it lamp i'm going to right click on it mark it as an asset so now i have this lamp in my furniture asset now it has not been saved so i'm going to make sure that i come over to my file menu i'm going to save this library when i'm i'm actually working in the furniture library.blend file i'm not working on a project so to add an object to your library you're either going to have to import it into this blender file or you are going to have to create it here i'm going to save it and now when i go back to my demo project i can actually come over here i can i can come back to my furniture library and then i can drag the furniture or the piece of lamp onto the table i can go back to my shapes library and then i can make that lamp red just like so pretty simple to do i hope you enjoyed this video i hope it helps you with learning how to use the asset library system um just remember every library blender file that you create every blender file that you're going to use as a library should be in its own folder however you structure your folder system and what i mean by that is if i come over to this blender asset libraries you can see i have furniture and shapes and in those are just the files that hold the assets and you can see it creates a text file with the categories as well as the blender file so for instance if i wanted to add in a new library i should i should create another folder and call it let's say i wanted to call this cars and then i can go and create a brand new blender file library to become a cars library and just add cars to that modify those however i want to use this as a library if you have any questions leave in the comment section below guys i hope you liked this video if you did please give it a thumbs up if you're not a subscriber consider subscribing to my channel as it does help my channel grow i will be doing um over the next few days i'll be doing some courses on how to use blender 3.0 it hasn't changed much from blender 2.9 x but we're going to get a little more into it thanks for watching and have a great day

Channel: Peter Grande

Views: 2,234

Keywords: blender 3.0, blender guru, blender tutorial for beginners, blender 3, blender 3.0 tutorial, blender asset creation, blender asset browser 3.0, blender asset library addon, blender asset browser tutorial, blender asset pack, learning blender 3.0, learning blender 3, learn blender 3, learn blenders asset browser, blender asset browser, blender 3d, blender 2.8, asset library, 3d tutorials, blender 3d modeling

Id: LnPlW_KX9PA

Length: 33min 5sec (1985 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021