Hey everybody. Let’s build an HDRI library in Blender’s
asset browser together for FREE! The Blender asset browser can be used for
a lot of things. Today we’re using it to build an HDRI library. HDRIs are high dynamic range images used to
create world lighting in our scenes. If you need an introduction to HDRIs I’ve
got an intro video you can check out first. By the end of this video, we’ll have a library
of free HDRIs inside of our Asset Browser. With this library, we can browse HDRIs and
easily drag them into our scene. Every Blender user should take the time to
set one of these up. They’re incredibly useful. Let’s go. I should mention that I’m using Blender
3.2 for this. The asset library was added in Blender 3.0,
but I’m not sure worlds were supported in that version. This definitely works in Blender 3.2 and beyond. The very first thing we need to do is to download
several HDRIs. If you already have a bunch of HDRI’s then
you can skip past this part. Let’s start at PolyHaven.com, formerly HDRIHaven. Click Browse HDRIs and here we have a ton
of free HDRI’s we can choose from to build our library. Let’s download a few with different lighting
conditions. Let’s make sure to get some clear daylight
ones, some cloudy ones, some starry night sky ones, oh and this sunset one looks pretty. We can choose interior HDRI’s as well. Really anything we are going to want inside
of our asset browser library. When we download these we have different options
up here. I’m choosing 8K EXR files, but if you’re
tight on space, you can choose to download them in 4K. Now, you probably have some form of organization
for how you manage your 3D assets. I have a Blender Folder and in that folder
I have an HDRI folder. Wherever you choose to store your HDRI’s
is fine. But you should have one central place for
them. Now we need to create a new Blender file and
store it somewhere that makes sense. You’ll see why in a minute but I’m going
to store it right here in my HDRI folder. So we will open up Blender and immediately
save the new file in the location we’ve chosen on our computer. This file is going to serve as the “Current
File” or, in other words, the home base file for all of the HDRI’s in our library. I will name mine “HDRI Library.” Now it doesn’t matter what else is in the
scene so let’s delete all of this. Before we do anything in here, we have to
set up a file path to our library so the Blender Asset Browser will know where to find all
of our HDRIs. We’ll go into Edit Preferences. Down toward the bottom, we have a tab for
File Paths. And at the bottom of this, we have “Asset
Libraries.” I already have some asset libraries set up. You may only see the default one. But let’s set up a specific library just
for our HDRIs. Click the plus icon to add a new library. Now we want to navigate to the location where
we saved this new .Blend file, that is going to be our home base or “current” file
for our library. This is the file we are in now which I named
“HDRI Library”. This is not necessarily where we saved the
actual HDRIs, just in case you saved them in different places. The location of the Blender file is what’s
important for this. So we’ve got the name of our library “HDRIs”
and the file path to that home base file here. Save the preferences and close out of here. We are going to create a different “World”
for each HDRI. We do that by going to the World Properties
tab in the properties panel. The world is basically the sky and the infinitely
far away globe that surrounds our entire scene. Worlds can serve as a background for our scene
and can also provide light for our scene. We already have a default world called “World.” In render preview mode, we can see the world. I’ll change the color here, just so you
can see what the world actually is. We’ll keep this world and bring in our first
HDRI. Let’s go to the shading workspace and in
the shader editor, change this drop down box from Object to World. This lets us use nodes to edit the world instead
of object materials. If this “Use Nodes” box is not checked,
you’ll need to turn that on. I’ll also go into render preview mode up
here so we can see the world in this workspace as well. This is the basic world setup with a simple
background color fed into a world output node. We’ll leave this, but press “Shift A”
to add a new node. Search for an “Environment Texture” node. Plug the color of the environment into the
color of the background. The world turns purple because we don’t
have an image selected over here. Let’s click “Open” and navigate to the
folder where we stored all of our HDRI files. Hopefully you saved them all in one place. Select the first HDRI we want to add to the
library. Now back to the world properties settings. The default name of “world” isn’t going
to work for us. Let’s give this world a name which describes
the HDRI that we’ve added. I’ll call this sunny day 1. Next we need to mark this world as an asset. To do that, we right click on the name of
the world and then choose “Mark as Asset.” This just told Blender that we want this world
to be available in our asset browser. We can test to see if this worked by changing
this editor window from the shader editor to the asset browser editor. The asset browser is accessed right here with
the icon that looks like books sitting on a shelf. So in our current file, we have one asset
and it’s the Sunny Day 1 we just added. It created a pretty terrible preview image
– I will show you how to change that in a few. By the way, current file is the default here
and it only shows what is saved in this actual file. The drop down box will display any libraries
we have set up – including our HDRI library. If we select that, we see the HDRI is in that
library as well. And that is good. We’ve got more to cover but if you’ve
made it this far, I would love it if you gave the video a like really quick – it’s hugely
appreciated – thank you! Now let’s go back to the shader editor and
add some more HDRIs to our library. The next step is very important. If we just changed out the HDRI image here,
we’d only be updating our single HDRI in the library, and not actually adding a new
one. Go back up to the name of the HDRI and the
middle icon on the right is for creating a new world. Press that and now it’s created Sunny Day
1.001 which is an exact duplicate of the first Sunny Day World. Clicking this drop down box will show that
we have two worlds available in this .Blend file. And this “F” next to the first one is
good because it indicates the world has been automatically saved as a “Fake User” - but
that is not really anything we need to cover here. Anyway, now with the new world selected, we
can go to our environment node and click the file folder button. It opens right up to where our HDRI’s are
stored. And we can choose a new HDRI to add. This time I’ll choose a cloudy one. Open Image. Just like before, we will give this one a
new name such as “Cloudy sky 1.” Then we’ll right click it and select “Mark
as Asset.” Then we’ll click the new world icon again
and it creates our third world. Back to the environment node, click the folder
icon and find our next HDRI to add. Select it and press “Open Image.” Change the name. Right click and “Mark as Asset” again. We should have three HDRIs in our library
now. You probably want to add lots and lots more,
and I encourage you to. But in the interest of time, we are just doing
three here. Let’s go back to the asset browser and see. Yep, three assets but the preview images are
useless. Let’s fix those now. Select the first one we made – the sunny
day world. Press “N” on the keyboard and the sidebar
opens on the right in the asset browser. Right here we have an area to customize the
preview image of this asset. We can click the file folder icon and navigate
to our HDRI folder. Make sure you choose the correct HDR image
for this world – they need to match, then just click on it and press “load custom
preview.” Now, that’s an 8k image. Obviously huge for a thumbnail, but since
it doesn’t seem to slow anything down, Blender must be shrinking it down to optimize as a
thumbnail. I’m not really sure though. Anyway, we can do this for the other worlds
while we are still here in this file. Make sure we save the file – that is super
important. Before we get to the best part, which is actually
using this library, there’s one more step we may want to consider to keep our library
organized. On the left of the asset browser, we have
this area which displays what are called catalogs. Catalogs serve kind of like folders – although
they’re really more like filters – for our assets. If we want to categorize our HDRI’s – say
we want a catalog of daytime HDRIs, indoor HDRIs, etc, we can press this plus icon to
add a catalog. Double click and name it something appropriate. Then go back to either “All” or “Unassigned.” Unassigned will display – you guessed it
– any assets that are not assigned to a catalog. Select the assets you want to move into this
catalog and just drag them onto it. As far as I can tell you can make as many
catalogs as you want. You can also make catalogs within catalogs. And some bonus info – higher level catalogs
will display everything in all of their subcatalogs. That’s why they’re really more like filters
than they are folders. But I digress. Again, always save the file – catalogs won’t
keep unless you save it. Now let’s see how this will work when we
go to use our library. Let’s open a brand new Blender file. Let’s pull up this workspace here and change
it to the asset browser editor. Uh oh, there’s nothing here. That’s because by default it displays the
“Current File” which is this file and there are no assets in this file. Change this to our HDRI library and there
we go. Our worlds are here. If you want to make the display images larger,
click this button and we can change the size of the preview image. Is the suspense getting to you yet? How do we import a world into our scene? Drumroll please. Oh, let’s go to render preview mode. Ok, here we go. Just click our HDRI and drag it into our scene. That simple. Don’t like that one, click another one and
drag it into the scene to change it. This is a library you can continue to build
over time as you accumulate more HDRIs. Just always add them into that one HDRI library
file that we were working in. When we’re in that file, we can remove a
world from the asset browser by selecting it in the world properties panel, and then
right clicking and choosing “Clear Asset.” This and any other changes we want to make
to the library has to be done in that original .Blend file. We can’t move assets into other catalogs,
rename them or really do anything unless we are in the file where we marked them as assets. If you want to learn more about the asset
browser and its other uses, I’ve created a current and comprehensive user guide, which
is free, and it can be found with the link in the description or by going to brandonsdrawings.com/assetbrowser
Give me a like and hit that subscribe button if this was helpful. Stay Creative!
