New asset features in Blender 3.3+

hi this is Daniel and in this video I'm going to show you how to use two new features that have recently been added to blender and a recent version update where we can finally use Collections and node groups as an actual asset in the asset browser which means you can store all your complicated node groups and your shaders and your materials and your procedural stuff whatever you made node groups can be an asset and collections which combines any number of objects those can also be a reusable asset in your asset browser and that is a ginormous timesaver for those who like to throw things together or have a set way of doing things or like to use the same assets and different projects so let's get to it and I'll show you how to get the most out of blender all right I've got open blender 3.4 I recently installed it and was so excited to find that they added back the collections and node groups asset feature which was introduced in 3.0 and then they took it away and now it's back I guess it's more stable now let's learn how to use it I'm going to open up a recent project I made where where I basically kid bashed a spaceship and it's actually free to download in my previous video where I show you how to make a sci-fi fantasy scene with a spaceship that crashes in front of an ancient Temple super cool I made this out of my Star Wars Kit bash product which you can buy online but consider this a free demo all these parts are free to play with and do what you want and this is a ship I made so I have the ship contained inside of an empty if I go to my outliner using the view layers view you can see all my pieces of my kit bash here parented to an empty which means when I move the empty everything inside of it moves with it and that's how I like it it just makes things easy to reorient and place objects I don't want to accidentally grab the wrong piece and move it or something like that and ruin my spaceship so the circle empty is really cool and there's actually a bunch of different empties you may not know this even a cube a sphere a cone an image never used that before so lots of cool things there to help you just kind of organize your scene all the parts in the spaceship do have a nice generic metal hole texture which has some grit and dirt to it and that here will also move with this collection as an asset to use in future blender projects so what you want to do is you want to put all the objects that you want to keep as an asset into a collection remember the collection is going to be the asset itself The Collection can be drag and dropped into future projects from the asset browser I wonder how many times we're going to say asset in this video way too many times that's how many so first I'm going to select the empty I'm going to hold shift and just click on the bottom so that goes from the first to the last object all the ship stuff is selected and now press M for move and click new collection now I'm going to name this ancient ship crash there we go actually it doesn't make sense ancient crash ship I don't know English is hard so there we go we've got our collection here with our empty and all the actual objects we can put any other type of object inside this collection it will travel with it such as a text object let's do that move it up here let's put it in front of the ship like a little label I'm going to include a curves Circle which basically makes a two-dimensional object from a curves right there awesome make it like a ground that it landed on don't I don't need it but you know it's there give it a black material cool oh my gosh look at that I forgot to put material on that part of the legs that's embarrassing there we go and there I'm always calling out my mistakes in these videos hope you guys appreciate that so we've got our collection here with a circle the empty with the shapes of the ship and the text object let's right click and Mark it as asset that's what you got to do first is Mark it as an asset now step number two of about three steps is you need to save this file in the correct location so blender before I do that let me show you a blender in the preferences of the file paths looks in certain folders and it calls them libraries asset libraries I've got about six of them here for different types of assets that I use this one is a kickback so it's going to go in the kit bash Library therefore I need to save this blend file in the kit bash folder as you can see I have the names the same from library name to folder name that helps me keep things straight so file save as we're going to go to our blender file kit bash and I'm going to name this ancient crash ship freebie I already have it saved here because I did this earlier my microphone wasn't on and yeah that totally happened so I'm going to save save again I'm telling on myself save it right there now blender is looking in that kid bash folder it will see this asset this collection and I can use it later however before I do that I might want to organize it a little bit first so let's go to our asset browser here we go and if we go to the library called kit bash here's everything because I'm on all I don't want that I'm going to go to unassigned and here's my ancient crash ship I'll change our View to a little bit larger there we go cool so we got my ship you can see the text in front the circle underneath and it's ready to use but it's not organized yet it's just in the unassigned basically the orphan area there's no folder no no catalog actually so I'm going to make a catalog and I'm going to make it ships go to unassign and simply drag this asset to these ship's catalog awesome so catalogs are inside of libraries right I'm inside the kit bash library but these are all different catalogs I've made here's all my Chuck CG stuff which I talked about in the previous video um Mr spacehead stuff I got off of blend swap props and accessories from various downloads and of course this amazing Tatooine scene by Danny Burns really good stuff there but enough of that I see it here in the ship's catalog now remember this you cannot reorganize things that are not in the blend file you have open for example if I realize like I just did that I have a Chuck CG asset here that's not in the right place I cannot drag this to where it needs to be actually there's nothing there let me yeah I can't move this joint to say here because look at that little red text only assets from this current file can be moved between catalogs you can't organize other blend file assets unless you have that blend file open very very annoying blender really needs to fix that I need to be able to organize things no matter what blend file I have open it's silly and it's really annoying the asset browser has a long way to go to be completely amazing it's getting there they're doing little baby steps but that's one thing that really needs to be improved on is the fact that I can't organize stuff unless I have the original blend file open or is this blend file I may not know luckily you can open the side panel and it'll tell you source source is that blend file I need to open that to organize it you can even click on this button to open it which is just you shouldn't have to do that come on blender that's really really annoying that's just clunky and slow so uh I'm done with my rant so let's move on let's open a new file and yes to save changes you have to have everything saved for the asset to work all right so with the new file open if I open my asset browser go to my kit bash library and then my new ships catalog here is the collection asset of the spaceship so I can now just drag and drop this right into my scene wherever I want it to appear and boom shakalaka there it is and all is Gloria and all of its separate pieces including the random Circle floor the meshes and the text object however there's something weird that I discovered which is the acid is literally just a collection it doesn't actually have the objects um there like not individually at least they're just kind of combined and I think that's because this asset collection is actually more of an instance of a collection an instance is like I don't know how to even word it it's like a copy um a clone without actually having the material it will render and it'll actually save time if you have a whole see a whole bunch of trees in your scene you can have an instance of that tree and put 1 000 of them in your scene and you know it makes a lot easier on your computer but you still still just a clone of the original object so this is just an instance however you can still get those objects all back and editable and individualized if you select your collection asset press spacebar or wherever whatever your search feature is maybe F3 same thing and type in the word real and that first one is make instances real and it's kind of strange but when you do that it makes it not an instance anymore it makes it a group of objects it's still within the collection but they're not parented anymore so we kind of just have everything just individual so if you are using my weird parenting trick you'll need to fix that but you're probably not because I'm just weird but all the objects are just there laid bare for you to do whatever you want if you want to put them back in a collection such as for that ship to keep things organized you will need to manually select them like this um M new collection ship there we go and that's honestly annoying I kind of wish it it knows that I'm turning instance into objects why isn't it in a collection I don't know but this is one of the many areas that blender has some work to do on in order to kind of get up to speed and make things more user friendly is don't make collection assets instances maybe that's a good reason for certain uses but not for me I wish it would just drop put it like this this would be way more handy for me cool so that is it for collection assets let's move on to node group assets so node groups are combinations of complex node networks like this that you don't want to have a big mess in front of you you really only want to tweak maybe five or six different parameters so you make it into a node group and it really is awesome because it simplifies your setup it gives you very easy control in a very efficient way and you can customize all the sliders minimum maximums of course what they're named how they work and there's a lot of really great ways to customize them and it just makes things a lot more efficient and honestly more fun because when it comes down to it you want your creative artistic process to have a little fun in it and to be of course user friendly here I am playing with a number of my my procedural node group shaders that I have created called the DG or Daniel Grove sci-fi shaders they're available on my gumroad for super cheap and as you can tell they have all kinds of cool functions to add some style and texture to your objects procedurally without using any textures and these no groups are simply a building block to use inside of your larger texture setup so as you can imagine having these node groups as a ready and available asset to drag and drop into your setups is a huge Time Saver because you can literally spend 100 hours making the perfect fine-tuned node group and you don't want to make that again even just using file in a PIN to add stuff it just takes some time so let's use the asset browser to speed up our workflow and I'm going to show you how to make a quick and easy node group and then of course turn it into an asset for later use so here I'm going to make a flat plane with shift a go to mesh click on plane I'm going to press the period button or the decimal on my numpad on my keyboard to Center and zoom into it and then numpad 7 to get a flat above view we're going to use this as basically a preview plane for the material that we're going to create I'm going to split my view horizontally to create the top part and turn into my Shader editor make a new material I'm going to name it noise maker because we're going to make a simple little no group with two different noise patterns that we can mix and match and use for anything from dirt to Grime and all kinds of helpful pieces for later materialing to create this setup let's make two noise textures shift a click on search type in noise texture there it is shift a again click on search mus for Musgrave texture I like to keep them vertically aligned like this next to make a mix node this used to be called mix RGB now and I think 3.3 or 3.4 they just renamed it to mix which is what the compositor always called it I always thought that was kind of weird next we're going to add a color color ramp so type in color ramp and actually put this on the noise texture because the noise texture it's very flat and has very little contrast which makes it hard to work with sometimes so I'm going to add some contrast by dragging up the black point to be blacker and drag down the white point to make the whites brighter there we go that's a good starting point for the noise texture in my opinion next we're going to add a map range a very underappreciated but awesomely powerful node which is basically the color ramp but with actual animatable and controllable parameters drag your result of the mix into the value which is kind of the input and lastly let's make an invert node in case we want to flip flop all the values from black to white white to black and put this in the color input lastly let's put the color output of this final little chain we've created into base color so we can see the results you will not see anything unless you are in the material view or rendered view I would suggest for this just go to material preview mode so you can see you know the basic render without worrying about render times now let's uh change some of the stuff up here put your mix factor to zero you could put this on color mode but I'm just going to keep it on float since we're just working with black and white values I think we're okay but I'm no mathematician so if I'm wrong please roast me in the comments down below so put your mix Factor at zero which means it's all a what is a the noise texture right here this is just a crossfader we're going to cross it between noise and Musgrave noise okay they don't look really cool yet because we haven't tweaked them yet so let's turn it up our roughness turn up our detail there we go we already got some cool stuff going on here you can see what the contrast does uh adding some crunch to your texture awesome so that's uh pretty nice for the noise texture let's Crossfade to b or one and B is Musgrave texture which is a different type of noise I think uses math or something like that I don't know they don't pay me enough to figure that part out so that looks cool and now we can fade between oh let it load come on noise must grave somewhere in the middle is a nice mix of both let's turn this little doohickey into a node group for later use select it all with box select if you don't have that press B box select them all and don't get the bsdf over here this is not included in the Shader we don't need that so box selected and press Ctrl G to make it into a group now you're wondering where did the bsdf go where did the output go well they're up one level so if you press the up Arrow or press tab you're out of what I call edit mode for the node group and now we're in just normal material view this is our node group our little baby newborn node group with no settings yet if you selected and press tab you can edit the in the contents inside of it or press the little icon on the top right and you go into edit mode so we want to add some tweakable controls here so they can really easily play with stuff on the outside which is here we're going to add faders right here I'm going to first add some Vector input so we can decide how this noise is going to be mapped onto our final objects next I want to control the scale of the noise the roughness and the Distortion so we can give a cool wavy effect I'll show you what that does in a minute next we're going to do the Musgrave texture controls so I want scale and let's do Dimension that's a good way to control the crunchiness of it over here we want to control the mix factor which is our crossfader between noise and noise B and our map range let's grab the bottom two inputs two minimum and then two maximum which is kind of like the brightness and darkness of it um like I said it works sort of like this gradient map where we can move the white and black points and then our invert control on the very bottom and now let's go out to the normal material view by pressing Tab and here we go your first Shader we've got scale of noise one scale of Noise two the Crossfade between A and B on the two minimum and maximum can brighten things or darken things which is really helpful if you're using this for a reflection map like roughness or metallic you can really control what the minimum maximums are very handy we've got our in invert so flip flop inverts the values oh and here's our cool Distortion trick watch this if you Crossfade to a watch what happens when I play the Distortion awesome it adds some nice wobbly Distortion to the noise texture all right now let's take this to the next level and really organize this the way it should be so we can more easily control it go back into edit mode of the node group press in to get your side panel go to the group tab and let's expand this a little bit so we can see all the stuff we had to play with all right so I want the first section to be the noise one right this is noise a the noise texture but I want to add a break an empty spot so I can see where the noise A and B are so click plus erase the text there and check hide value so technically we have an input here but there's nothing there and if we go out look an empty spot yay it could nicely divide your controls to make things a little bit more user friendly I'm gonna add a few more of those click plus no text and hide value there we go so here is noise number two break and then we finally have the factor which I'm going to rename to mix Mi X and I want this to be at the very top so I'm going to click my arrows there we go so now our mix Factory is the first thing we can play with and then on the bottom we've got kind of the value control which is I think is logical and nice they have those at the bottom as a final touch to tweak things cool so there we go oh one more thing we got to give this thing a name so I'm in material view right here go to node give it a name noise maker and I'm going to copy that paste it into the label and very important the properties this is the actual data name as far as blenders code is concerned so whatever you need me here it's what is going to be named in your asset browser so give it a good name be fancy and give it a little color don't make anything distracting though all right let's get to the point here we're going to make this an asset that's the whole reason you're watching this ding video so how do we do that well we can't right click the node the node group because it's not over here it's not an object in the scene it is a piece of data in the blender scene though that's hidden in the background so let's change our view of the outliner to look at not the layers but the blender file itself and now you have full access to all the hidden things inside to use the material itself which we could make an asset but that's not what we're doing right now we're going to make the node group itself an asset so we can just drag and drop this as a building block like I said earlier so find your node groups there's our noisemaker right click go to Mark as asset and we have the library icon it's now an asset but wait we're not done we need to organize it organization is so key when you're working with assets I don't care what program you're in you still got to keep things organized so because this is kind of a general use noise creating node group I'm going to go to shaders node groups I have a specific catalog just for node groups and I'm going to go to noises these are some really cool noise things I found online for free if I can find the link to it I'll put it down below but it makes all kinds of different noises that blender doesn't really provide out of the box and I want this to be in here the one that I just made so go to unassigned look for our noisemaker oh it's not showing up you know why because I have not saved this file that's another key component to the blender asset browsing system is you've got to save your blend files in the right place that's why it's not even seeing this so Ctrl s now I need to save it in the right place so I'm going to be organized I'm going to go to my blender folder shaders and I'm just going to save it in here as noise maker no group so I know 100 what it is save it and I'm gonna click the refresh button right here and there it is noise maker node groups do not have thumbnails yet you could render something and um add it by using the preview you could you can actually add your own preview image if you want to do that but uh I'm not going to do that right now you can add tags if you want description author all that cool stuff and over here it does show you where this asset is coming from which in this case is a kernel file anyway let's put it in my node groups thingy here it is noise maker drop it into noises right there make sure to save that change because that is a change to the actual file new blank blender project let's open our asset browser navigate to where I dropped it to which is shaders no groups noises there's our noisemaker now let's add an object UV sphere zoom into it with a period on your num key I'm going to make this a smooth shaded sphere just because I like it now I'm going to open up my material view over here so I can add this node group into my material drag and drop it plug it on in and there is our node group asset ready to be used in other projects thank you so much for watching this video if you have any questions or if I screwed something up let me know in the comments down below and I'll do my best to answer you or learn from you I hope you learned some really great for this video please be sure to share it subscribe and like all that stuff thanks again hope to see you again soon

Channel: Daniel Grove Photo

Views: 8,035

Keywords: blender, asset manager, asset browser, free assets, scifi, science fiction, blender spaceship, blender scifi, nodegroup, shader, shaders, noise, blender nodes

Id: a3RcbNw3t-E

Length: 20min 45sec (1245 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 05 2023