How to Use Blender's New Asset Browser (Tutorial)

in this tutorial i'm going to show you how to set up and use blender's new asset browser feature in blender 3.0 so blender's asset browser is a really cool feature in blender and when you've set it up you can just locate to blender's asset browser and then you'll be able to scroll through different materials and objects and different things that you've created and you can very quickly drag and drop them into your 3d scenes now do make sure you're using blender version 3.0 or a future version because in blender version 2.9 the asset browser wasn't added the asset browser was just recently added in the new 3.0 version so make sure you have the latest version so the first thing i'm going to do is actually use my file browser and i'm going to create this folder called asset library now you can create this folder pretty much wherever you want and you can name it whatever you want and this is where you're going to store all of the different assets so in this tutorial i'll show you how to add materials and also objects so i'm first going to show you how to add in materials so what you're going to do inside this asset library folder wherever you want to store the assets you can just add a new folder so i'm just going to add a new folder and i'm just going to call this materials and if you're unfamiliar with my file browser that is because i am using linux mint but this should work exactly the same on windows and mac all right so now that i've created that folder i'm going to hop over to the product files of my blender procedural material pack so if you haven't heard about my blender procedural material packs i create packs of 10 realistic procedural materials created with blender's procedural nodes so in this video i'll be using my first procedural material pack as an example and if you'd like to purchase my blender procedural material packs i'll have a link in the description where you can purchase on my gumroad store and that is also a really great way to help support me and this channel so i'm going to take the blender file and i'm going to copy it then i'm going to go right back over here to the asset library folder and i'm going to go inside the materials folder and then i'm going to paste the copy of this blender file and then i can open the blender file so what i need to do now is i need to mark the materials as an asset because on default everything in the scene isn't marked as an asset so you just need to tell blender what you want to actually be an asset so what i'm going to do is i'm going to click right up here when the crosshair appears and then i'm going to click and drag over and this is going to split the window and then right up here i'm going to click on this and i'm going to change it to the new asset browser so now what i'm going to do is i'm going to select one of these materials and then i'm going to hop over to the material properties so now what i want to do is just mark these as an asset so what you can do is you can just right click right here and then you can click on mark as asset and you can also do that right over here so you can click on this and then you can mark it as an asset or you can also clear the asset if you don't want it to be an asset now if you look right up here if you click on the all or unassigned you can see that it's actually rendered out a quick preview so i'm just going to continue to do this for all the materials so i'm going to click on this material and then i'm going to right click and then click on mark as asset now i have a bunch of materials here and if i want to do them all at the same time then what i can do is i can right up here in the outliner click on this and then i can click on blender file and then i can go right down here to materials and then what i can do is hold down the control key and then i'm going to select all the materials then all at the same time i can just right click and then i can click on mark as asset and it's going to mark them all as an asset and now blender is going through and it's just quickly rendering a little preview and you can see now all those previews are loading up of the materials so now right over here in the asset browser you can organize these into different categories so i'm going to click on this plus here to create a new catalog and i'm going to rename this catalog to procedural materials now you can see that the procedural materials aren't in this new category so if i click right back over here on all you can see they're right here but they're not in the procedural materials so to add them to this procedural material category i'm going to click on the all and then i'm going to click right here and i'm going to drag and just box select all of them then i can click and drag and i can drop this into the procedural materials so now if i click on this you can see they are all in the procedural materials category now i can actually create another category inside this category so i'm sort of creating like folders and it's a nice way to organize all the different assets right here i'm going to click on this plus button and that is going to create another catalog in the procedural materials catalog and i can just rename this to marble so now that i've created the marble category i can click back over here on the procedural materials and i'm going to click on the dark marble and then hold down the control key and click on the other marble materials then i can just drag and drop them into the marble category and now if i click on the marble category it's only going to show me the marble materials and then i want to create another category so back over here on the procedural materials i'm going to click on this button to add another one and this one i'm going to rename rock and then if i click back over here on the procedural materials i can drag the concrete into the rock and then i could also drag this rock one into the rock so now i have a rock category and a marble category and then all of the procedural materials and then if you've created some catalogs but you want to delete them you could just right click and then click on delete catalog and i'll do that for this one as well delete catalog and then something to note if you right click on the rock one and click on delete catalog now if you go back to the procedural materials you can see that the rocks aren't there so what you need to do is click on the all again just to see all of them and then you can just drag the concrete into the procedural materials and also the rock into the procedural materials alright now it's really important to save this blender file if you want to save this data so what you can do is you can click on this button right here and that'll save the catalogs or you can also just press ctrl s and that will save the blender file and save the catalogs and then we can just close this blender file now you may have noticed that once we've created the catalogs blender has now created this little text file um and this is just some data that blender needs um so you can just ignore it and just leave it where it is alright so i've just opened a new fresh blender file and i'm going to show you how to set up the asset browser so if you click right here and drag over to separate the window and duplicate it you can click right here and then you can click on the asset browser now if you click right here and click around and look at the current file you can see that the procedural material catalogs that we've created are not actually there and that is because they are still just in the procedural material blender file but they're not in your default startup so what you need to do is click on edit and then open up the preferences and then just click right over here on file path and you can see that there is a tab for asset libraries so now we need to create a path to tell blender where we've saved the assets so i'm going to click on this plus button right here and that is going to take me to blender's file browser so i now just need to locate to the folder where i have the blender file and i can actually just click and drag and drop the blender file here and it's going to go to the folder and then click on add asset library now it wants you to give it a name so i'm just going to call this procedural materials all right so now that i've set that up it's really important that you click on save preferences or the auto save preferences might already be turned on and it'll automatically save the preferences so just save the preferences and then i can close this so now you can see that it's still not there but that is because we are only looking at the current file so i need to click on this and then you can see there are the procedural materials and also the marble category as well now if you have a lot of assets you might want to change the size of the preview so what you can do is you can click right here on the arrow and drag down and you can see that there are a bunch of different settings here on this top panel so right here you can click on this button and then you can change the size so i like to change it to tiny and i also have created a lot more procedural materials that i'm going to be adding into my asset browser so i want them to be a bit smaller so i can see more of them then right over here there is a search and this is very useful especially if you have a bunch of different assets because you can search for different assets so you can also make a category like the marble category but you could also in the search here start to type in marble and as long as these have marble in the name you can see now they're all going to show up now you can also filter different assets so if you click right here a filter is going to come up and i could choose to only see the materials but not anything else or if i've added objects and i don't want to see the materials i could just turn on objects um just to filter that so you can only see a certain type of asset so i've just added in some blender monkey heads and what you can do is you can just click and drag and you can drop the different materials onto the objects so this is super useful it's very quick and you can really quickly build up your scene alright so that is materials but i also want to show you how to add in objects so i'm going to close this blender file and i don't need to save it alright so for demonstration in this tutorial i'm going to be using my low poly nature assets pack so then just like we did before over in the asset library i want to create a new folder and i want to call this low poly nature and then i'm just going to hop into this folder and then i'm going to paste the blender file and then we can just open up the blender file and again if you'd like to help support me and my youtube channel then you can also purchase these low poly nature assets on my gumroad store so what i'm going to do is press a to select all the objects and then what i'm going to do is i'm going to right click on all of them in the outliner and i'm going to click on mark as asset and i know they've been added as assets because you can see there's a little book icon on all the objects in the outliner so now i can just uh split the window and i can change this window right over here to the asset browser and then also again right over here i want to click and drag out just so that i can preview those other settings and so what blender's done is it's gone through and it's created a little snapshot of all these different objects so now i can just do the same exact thing as the materials so i'm going to click on the plus here and i can just rename this to low poly nature and then what i can do is click right back over here on all and then i can just click and drag just to box select all of those objects and i can drop them into the low poly nature and then again if i want to create some sub catalogs i can click on the plus here and i'm going to rename this one to grass and i can click on the plus again i can rename this to mushrooms and i can click on the plus again and i can rename this to rocks so now back over here on the low poly nature i can just select all the rocks and i can drop them into the rock catalog and i can also hold down my control key and click on all the mushrooms and then i can drag and drop these into the mushroom catalog and then also i'll do that for the grass so we have some grass assets i'll throw that into the grass and then also something that's really cool is i can actually create a catalog within catalogs so within the mushroom catalog i can click on the plus here and then click on the plus again and i can call this one red and then i can call this one brown and then back over here on the mushrooms catalog i can select these ones and i can put them in the brown and then i can select these ones and i can put them in the red alright so then again it's really important to save this blender file so you can click on this button right here and that is going to save it and you can also just press ctrl s to save the blender file and then i can just close this all right so i've opened up a new cnn blender and if i just split the window i can go right here and i can change this to the asset browser and then if you click right up here you can see we have the procedural materials but we don't have the low poly nature so again i need to click on edit and i need to open up the preferences and then right over here under file path i need to click on this button and that's going to open up blender's file browser and then i just need to locate to where i've saved the low poly nature and then here is the low polynature folder and this is where i have the blender file and i didn't mention this earlier but within these folders you can also add in multiple blender files so in my material folder i'm going to be adding in more files for my other blender procedural material packs so i'm just going to locate to the low poly nature folder and then click on add asset library and then right here in the name i'm just going to call this low poly nature and then again really important make sure you click on the save preferences and that will save the preferences so this will be in your new blender projects so i can just close this now and if you click on the current file i can go to low poly nature and here we go and we have all the different categories and the objects alright so we've now come to the really fun part which is adding in all of the objects so i've just created this landscape here and i just gave it a green material for like a stylized grass so what i'm going to do now is just click and drag and i'm just going to drop these different objects into the 3d scene so you can just continue to click and drag and drop the assets in and you can see that as i'm dragging this you can see that it's rotating to fit the level of the ground so because this ground is kind of rotated you can see now if i add it in the tree is going to be a bit rotated and then once you've added in the asset you can scale it or rotate it and just move it around manually and this is really cool because as you can see i can very quickly just drag and drop in assets and i can create a cool little nature scene now something important to note is that on default these objects are going to keep the same data so i'm just going to add in this bush right here and then i'm just going to drag in another bush right here and then i can just rotate these around just like that now if i tab into edit mode on this bush you can see that these other ones go into edit mode as well and if i try to edit the bush in edit mode you can see that the other bushes are being changed as well and this is because on default right up here you can see it says append reuse data so what this is doing is it's adding in the objects but it's keeping the same exact data so they're basically just a duplicate of the object and in most cases this is really helpful and it also keeps the file size of the blender file smaller but let's say i actually want to go ahead and edit this bush and make it look a bit different so what i could do is i could delete this and then right up here i want to change the append reuse data and i'm going to instead just change it to append so it's not going to reuse the data so i can now just drag and drop in this bush and i can just rotate it around now if i tap into edit mode this object has its own data so i can just like duplicate some of these bushes kind of move it around maybe scale it up and i can create a different bush and you can see that it's not actually affecting the other bushes and so this feature is really quite useful but for most things you're probably just going to leave it at append reuse data now there's one more thing i wanted to let you know about in this video currently you're not able to create a asset from a collection so i've created this tv table 3d model and this is actually a tutorial result so i have a tutorial on how to create this link is in the description but i want all the different pieces to be separate objects and then what i've done is i've parented all the different objects to this one main controller object unfortunately at the time of creating this video you're not able to add multiple objects as one asset and you're also not able to add a collection as one asset but hopefully the blender developers will add this in a later version of blender so if you're watching this video a little bit into the future hopefully you can just right click on this and then you can add it as an asset but for the time being you're not able to do that so if i want to make this tv table an asset what i need to do is select everything and then i need to press ctrl j and ctrl j is going to join them together so that they are all one object and then i can just mark it as an asset all right and that is going to wrap up this video on how to use blender's asset browser so i hope this tutorial was helpful and thank you for watching and again if you'd like to help support me and this youtube channel then you can purchase my blender procedural material packs and that is a really great way to help support me and this channel and you can also check out my gumroad store and my patreon page where i have procedural materials 3d models and assets artwork project files and these low poly nature assets and more things like that on my gumroad and patreon but thank you for watching and i hope to see you in a future tutorial

Channel: Ryan King Art

Views: 10,951

Keywords: Ryan King Art, Blender Tutorial, Blender, Ryan King, Tutorial, asset browser, assets, asset library, blender 3.0, 3.0

Id: xU2c0FVVeQM

Length: 15min 20sec (920 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 11 2021