How to Organize Your Asset Files for the Blender Asset Browser!

hey what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com so i wanted to make a video talking about how to actually manage your assets inside of blender i think a lot of people have talked about how to um use the asset browser but i don't think they've talked very much about how you can actually like manage where the actual assets live so i thought that we'd talk about some good ways to do that in this video let's go ahead and jump into it alright so first off just a quick reminder of the way that the blender asset manager works so you need to have blender 3.0 or higher and what it does is it allows you to access different things inside of blender files that you've marked as assets for future use so for example i've got these wood materials in here i can access them inside of this file right here even though they're marked as assets and stored in another file so let's say for example that i wanted to create just a red material or something like that so if i was do a shift a add a plane and let's say we were to just create a simple red texture right so we'll just click on new we'll just call this red flat and we'll make this red so a very simple red texture right at the moment this texture lives inside of this blender file so it's accessed from directly within this blender file however it's not going to show up in your asset browser right now so if i was to click on the drop down right here and click on the option for current file notice how this doesn't show up as an asset however if you tell blender that this is an asset by right clicking on it and clicking the option for mark as asset and so then if you click on all notice how that red flat material now shows up inside of this file and i can drag it onto different objects inside of blender and so the problem we run into though is that this is only saved inside of our current file right it's not saved anywhere else well that's problematic because we need to be able to access this from external blender files well remember that the way the asset browser works is you set up in your preferences you set up a file location under file paths for your asset libraries basically what that means is that means that you save any blender file in here that has assets so the blender can reference it later and so the problem is though you start running into an issue where you could save every single blender file that you've ever made and you mark something as an asset in this folder but this folder is going to get massive and it's just not going to be very well organized right so there's a few different ways that you can do this so remember that you can add multiple folders in here so like for example i'm referencing this lights folder and i have files in here where i have different lights that i want to save right these are basically blend files that contain the lights that i want to use in the future and i've just kind of saved those in the folder so you can create folders in here and then set blender to look inside of those folders another thing you can do is you can also set up blender files like this materials paint blender file for example and you can add the different files that you want to be assets into that file so for example if i open this paint folder you can see how i've actually created little swatches in here of different materials that i want to save and i've specifically decided that this file is going to be for any paint style materials in here if i want to add a new material i would just do a shift d to duplicate and i would just apply the new material to this object right here and then i would save it so if i was to create like like i've got this glossy yellow paint right let's say i was to make this unique and i was to make a glossy green paint so if i was to just go into the shader editor right pick this material right here and just change the diffuse to like a green or maybe like a pink i don't think i have a glossy pink in here so let's say this was a glossy pink i would just name this paint glossy pink like this i would right click on it to make sure that it's marked as an asset inside of my folder and then i would save it so when i save it what i've done is i've created that new material that's marked as an asset inside of a file in my assets folder and so one other thing i would want to do really quick is i want to jump in my asset browser right here and i would just want to make sure that i've dragged this into the paint glossy catalog so that would show up under the glossy paint but now if i was to save this then i was to jump back into that other file and i was to refresh this asset library notice how that pink material is going to show up in here so what i'm doing is i'm managing my materials inside these separate files and so let's say that i wanted to add this flat red material that i created inside of this separate file well all i would have to do in order to do that is i would just have to jump into this paint file right here that i have open i would probably add a new piece of text so i'm going to add a text right here then i would just duplicate one of these swatches right here i'd go ahead and remove the material from it but now what i would do is i would take this material that i've created the red flat material we might call it paint red flat and i would append it into that file so all i would do is i would do a file append and then i would go into that folder i would find the material that i created in this case the red paint flat and i would just apply it to this object so i would just click the plus button and since i appended that now my flat red flat material is going to show up in the drop down and i can apply it to this object so now i've got this flat paint material in here and what i would do is i would create a new catalog under my materials so i'd click the plus button and i just call this paint paint dash flat right here and i would make sure that i take my flat red paint and i drag it in here so now if i was to go back into my asset browser and refresh my asset library notice how now that paint material is going to show up in there so basically what i would do is anytime i create a new material inside of a project that i like i would just append it into my file where i'm keeping my materials and so let's say that we wanted to create a whole new blender file so let's say we were to do a file new and we wanted to make a file where we stored like let's call it block or let's call it brick and stone so i would do the same thing right just create a little swatch i would add a text object i'm just going to tab in edit mode and i'm just going to call this block and i would move it over here so let's say i was to download a block material from like texture haven for example and set it up we're actually going to bring in a brick texture but i'm going to go ahead and set up this principal texture i'm going to apply it to this surface right here and we'll just call this brick red zero one and i'm going to make sure to mark that as an asset well what i'm going to do is i'm going to save this file inside of my assets file so let's do a file save as and in this case i'll call this materials underscore brick and block i like to name my files just so i can kind of uh reference them but i'm going to click on a save as right here well now if i do a save remember that i saved that in the assets folder so now it's going to show up in any blender file so if i add if i create like a new blender file and add a plane and i look inside my asset browser it's going to be in my justin's assets one thing i did not do that you want to make sure that you do is you want to make sure that you add this to a catalog so in this case for example i want to go back into my asset browser i don't need this but inside of my material i'm going to create a catalog we'll call it brick block and stone and we'll just make sure to drag this material into the brick block and stone right here and then do a file save well now if we jump back over into our new file and do a right click and click on refresh asset library we'll notice how because we saved that inside of that brick block and stone we can now access this inside of this file and so notice what it does is it sets up this brick material really quickly so you would follow the exact same process for assets as well you would just right click on it click on the option for mark as asset notice how when you do that you get the little books right here and if you were to look inside of your current file and click on the all button notice how the bonnie model is going to show up in here so then you could drag that in really quickly and again if you wanted to keep that for a future project you just want to make sure that you save that file inside of your assets folder if you want more information on how to do this with assets leave a comment below and let me know so there's really no official way of doing this so i'd love to hear from you in the comments down below how you're managing your assets and specifically the blender files inside of your assets folder i just love having that conversation with you guys let me know if you have any questions about anything that we talked about in the comments down below as always thank you so much for taking the time to watch this and i will catch you in the next video thanks guys

Channel: The CG Essentials

Views: 31,267

Keywords: blender, blender 2.82, blender 2.8, blender modifier tutorials, blender tool tutorial, the blender essentials, the cg essentials, thecgessentials.com, justin geis, justin geis blender, blender 2.9, blender 2.91

Id: TLpANTbSNO0

Length: 9min 19sec (559 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 21 2022