A place to share Node Groups, individually
With the growth of node based systems in Blender, mainly with Geometry Nodes and very recently the compositor that is getting some major improvement, it would be great to be able to share our node groups/ groups asset in a better way than currently.
To make myself clear, yes, it is possible today to share node groups with other artists, you can create a .blend file, create or append the node groups in it, and share the file! You can also mark the node groups as asset, so people can simply drag the file into a specific folder set for the asset browser, and then use the nodes whenever they want.
This is great but here's the big issue: The node groups asset are scattered all over the internet, it can be hard to find the exact node assets you're looking for, considering they were already made by someone and shared somewhere.
If you look on Superhive Market or Gumroad, you will find toolkits and packs of multiple nodes, which are often really amazing. But to me there's a major flaw: toolkits contains a lot of node groups, and for the average user, not all of them will be useful, maybe I'm only looking to use 25% percent, or maybe let's say only 1 very specific node! I often found myself downloading a pack of node groups, that included for example Displacement in geometry nodes, yet I already have a displacement node I made myself or from another toolkit, so I had to manually remove the nodes and other that I didn't need. While this is doable, it can get tidious overtime.
Other and final point before explaining the idea: New users can easily get overwhelmed by node systems, especially the Geometry Nodes, and they can believe they have to make everything from scratch. Making everything from scratch is of course useful and a great way to understand everything, but having access to a large choice of node groups made by the community, it enables access to more freedom and a better creativity flow.
Which is why I was thinking, what if there was a place, for example a new category in the blender extension website, that is precisely for indivual node groups that can be shared! The category itself could be split into Shaders-GN-Compositor And to keep the drag and drop thing from the addons or themes for example, you could drag and drop the node, and it would popup a little blender window that asks you if you want to append it in th current file, or put append it in a file from your asset browser to keep it forever (if so, maybe allow the user to place it into a Catalog-subcatalog or create new ones), or a better idea if you have one!
Thank you for reading and considering this, I truly hope to see something like it someday!
2 Comments
I believe I've read somewhere that the Extensions Platform aims to support some assets in the future.
Edit: it was mentioned on the Devblog that it could include keymaps and asset libraries.
Thank you, I'm truly curious to see where this will go. Hoping to see a consideration for individual node groups assets in there