How to Use the Asset Browser in Blender 3.0! (Step by Step Tutorial!)

what's up guys justin here with the cgessentials.com back with another blender 3.0 tutorial for you so in today's video we're going to check out the new asset browser and how you can use it to start storing your assets for blender so let's go ahead and just jump into it alright so to start off i've downloaded the diorama file that's available for blender 3.0 you can download that on the blender releases page if you scroll down to the asset browser section there's a link on this page it says download this cube diorama blend file to play with the new asset browser so this is an example file that blender has made available so that we can practice using the new asset browser and so if you look at this when you open it up what it has is it has a window open for your asset browser and so for blender let's say that we were to create a normal layout scene like this so just something like this right but if we wanted to open up the asset browser we could just drag in a new window right here and then now under the editor type you can go over to asset browser in order to see your asset library so you can open up the asset browser by doing that and so what we want to do is let's take a look at what's contained in here so this asset browser file contains both materials as well as objects that you can drag into the scene in order to make changes to the way everything looks so for example let's say i wanted to add some furniture i could just go into the object furniture section and i can just drag objects into this so let's say for example that we wanted to bring the desk in right here so you can drag this and notice how this object comes in and it'll align with whatever surface you put it over and it'll give you a little white it'll give you a little white grid in here showing you what it's going to be aligned with but if i let up on this it's going to place the desk inside of the scene and so then i'm just going to take the desk and i'm just going to rotate it i'm going to put it in place just like this you can also bring in other things so let's say for example i wanted to bring in like a short bench or something like that i could just drag the bench in right here and notice it's bringing the assets in fully textured and ready to go um so everything that was contained inside these objects is being brought into your scene and so then there's other things in here like for example i could add picture frames to the walls like this just by dragging them in notice how they load quickly and easily and so notice how there's not only objects in here but there's also materials so if i look at these materials notice how there's options for different materials that i can drag into my scene and i can drag these into my scene and notice how the materials are adjusting as i drag this in so what that's going to do is that's going to allow us to really quickly apply different materials to our scenes which is really exciting it means you can set these up once save them in your asset library and then access them whenever so this is a really powerful tool for being able to save and access things for blender and so now that we've taken a look at what's possible let's jump over into a fresh file and let's take a look at how saving things to the asset library works so i'm just going to create a new blender file right here and i'm going to go ahead and not save and let's go ahead and let's add an asset library so i'm just going to click and drag over here like this and we're going to add an asset browser so now the asset browser is in here notice how currently the asset browser is empty and so if you look at this notice how you can see the assets that are currently available in this blender session or you can also access other files that you've saved on your computer and so you can set that location by going to edit preferences under file paths that's going to give you a location or an option where you can set the location where you can save your asset libraries so i've set this location right here and basically that's just a folder where assets are going to be saved and so for now let's add some very simple assets to this scene so i'm just going to add some shapes in real quick all right so now i have four objects in my scene right i have bonnie the monkey the teapot and the gear and let's say that i wanted to save these for access later so we're going to go with these just because they're very simple and so we want to do is in order to save something for access later over in the asset browser what you do is you just go find it in your scene collection you right click and you click on the button for mark as asset and so notice how when you mark it as an asset it now shows up in your asset file over here and so if i was to click and drag this notice how she gets placed inside my viewport and so i'm going to delete this now one thing we're going to want to look at in a second is the direction of the model origin because that's going to affect the way this is brought in but let's say we wanted to add all of these as assets i'm just going to right click and mark this as an asset i'm going to mark this as an asset and i'm going to mark this as an asset so now we've got objects showing up in our scene right here and notice how we get a preview of how those look inside of our scene as well and so one thing to note about these is you can also select them and then tap the n key in order to get a window off to the right where you can add information about these so for example if i didn't want this to be called suzanne i could call it monkey and change the name right there so you can change things like the description as well as things like the preview file and so you can either have this set an automatic preview or you can also load in a custom preview image if you have something that you like better and so those objects also have the materials that were associated with them when we saved them and so one thing i want to point out about the material preview as best as i can tell unless i'm doing something wrong the preview is only going to update with materials if you apply something like a texture file associated with it and so let's say i was to apply like a wood material to this suzanne for example and then go back into the current file we'll talk about these other options a little bit later but if i was to go into this file and look at the suzanne option notice how the preview is still kind of this gray scale but if i click on the button to refresh like this then it's going to go through and it's going to update this new material on it and so if i was to jump this back over to a yellow material and then refresh this preview notice how this shows up as grayscale so just be aware that your previews in here are going to be driven by the materials that are placed on them and so now if i wanted to add them back to my scene i can just drag them in like this and notice how they retained the material information that they had when we saved them so those objects all have the materials that were associated with them inside of the model and so notice how my bonnie model when i added her to the scene she comes in sideways so the reason she comes in sideways is because my object axis is set up where the z-axis is pointing off to the side so to fix that first off you can remove objects from the library by right clicking and clicking on clear asset or you can just come over here and right click and clear asset notice how that removes it from the current file but what we want to do is we want to affect her origin so we're just going to rotate this on the x-axis negative 90 degrees like this and then we're going to go ahead and we're going to move this down as well so what we're doing is we're affecting the model origin the model origin is going to affect where the object is inserted so this is going to act as our base location for the object that's being inserted so now i've got my origin set up the way that i would like so i'm just going to add her to my asset library again so i'm just going to right click and click on marquez asset now if i drag her in she's going to come in standing up facing the proper direction so things like that are going to be important when you save things to your asset library and so while we're on the subject of the object origins note that those are also going to affect the previews that are created in here so for example if i was to go to my suzanne model right here notice how right now that model is giving me a preview that's kind of a side view however if i was to go into my object origins and rotate that origin along the z axis so 90 degrees like this so notice the green axis is facing forward notice how this is giving me a different preview than it was before so you can set that rotation like this and then update the preview in order to change the preview direction of the way the object is facing so that's basically going to allow you to set the direction those previews are being created that's also going to set the direction that these objects are facing when you drag them into your model okay and so let's say that we wanted to access these from an external or another file well what we need to do in order to do that is these are currently just being saved inside of this blend file right they're being stored inside of this file basically every object that's been marked as an asset is being stored in that file but it's only being saved in this current file what we want to do i'm going to go ahead and get rid of these extra objects that are in here is we want to take this and we want to do a file save as and we want to save a copy of this inside of that folder that we set in the preferences so if we do a file blender assets we want to save this as simple shapes dot blend and so we're just going to do a file save as and so what that's going to do is that's going to save that inside of the folder where we store our assets and so now if we go into this new file that we created we click the drop down we go to the justin's asset folder which is basically this folder right here and remember we set the label inside of our preferences right here but if we go into justin's assets right here see how everything that was saved inside of that folder is going to show up in here so i can bring that bonnie model in right here i could bring in the gear i could basically bring in all of the different objects that we saved in here so basically all we're doing is we're creating blender files with our objects inside of them and saving them in that folder and then this reads that and so we can also do this with materials so let's say for example that i wanted to be able to access like the materials and everything else that was created in that diorama file well what i could do is i could move that diorama file into that assets folder like this so if i paste this in there the cube diorama blend file is now in the blender assets folder and so now if i refresh this notice how it's going to read everything that's in that folder so now you're seeing all the assets that are in the files in that folder in this giant list all right so one thing that you might have noticed about this is that when we brought these over the categories that were contained inside of the diorama file aren't actually shown in here and the reason why is we only drag the blend file over but not the categories file so if we look at that diorama folder right here notice how it actually came with two different files it came with the cube diorama and the blender assets file well the blender assets file defines all of the different kinds of categories that are contained inside of the assets file so if you look at this right here notice how all of those different material categories that were created inside the blend file which by the way you can manage over here didn't get brought in with that so if we were to take this category file right here and we're just going to copy it so we're going to do an edit copy and we're going to paste that in right here notice how this is going to overwrite the category file that we already had in here but that's fine because there's nothing in it yet we're going to go ahead and replace this right here so now the blender category file that's over here shows up in this list and that category file is going to get saved inside your assets folder but if we look at this now when we refresh this notice how now all of those categories that were created in that original file are now contained in here so we've got folders for materials and for objects and let's say that we wanted to create a new category so we're just going to click in here we're actually going to click the plus button and we're just going to name this something like lights right here and so now let's say we were to add a light so we're just going to do a shift a we'll add a point light and we'll say it's 250 watts we're going to go ahead and we're going to mark it as an asset all right so we'll also add an area light so it's like we're starting a light library for our asset browser so we've created two kinds of lights in here and we want to put them in a lights category so we're just going to name this we're just going to add we want to put this in a lights catalog so we're just going to name this lights we're just going to drag these into the lights catalog we can get more in depth on organization later but i'm just going to do a file save as i'm going to save this as a lights dot blend right here in that folder well now if we were to create a new model and look at our asset browser so we're going to go into my justin's assets and so now notice how we've got the materials catalog we've got the lights catalog so you can bring these in really quickly so i could bring my 250 watt light in just like this or my area light from that library as well so you can use this in order to create more in-depth catalogs and categories just remember that you are going to have to continue saving files into that folder and then one other thing is let's say you wanted to save materials into your files so like let's say we wanted to save this blue material right nothing special about it we'll turn the roughness down so it's a little bit reflective but let's say you wanted to save this material well you would just jump into your material properties right here and for the material you can right click on it and you can mark that as an asset and so notice how when you do that that's going to save that as an asset inside of your current file so what that means is that means that now you can drag that out of your asset library onto objects you can you can use this in order to save all of your materials and then we would just do the same thing we just saved the blend file um so that we could access it from our overall assets folder all right so you can also save poses in here which we'll talk about in a future video but leave a comment below let me know what you think about this system i know it starts off a little bit confusing once you figure out the way that it works though i think it's pretty easy to use but again leave a comment below let me know what you think i'll link to some other 3.0 videos on this page as well 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: 21,662

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, blender 3.0, blender assets, blender asset browser, blender asset browser tutorial, blender asset browser beginner tutorial

Id: NMpjb7kl94s

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 06 2021