Allow asset brower to browse current file's materials, nodes, objects etc. without marking as assets
You can currently easily access all the assets of a scene from the python API, and the Outliner. However, this is not easily accessible for artists.
On the other hand, the Asset Browser allows very easy access to assets, but only from catalogs.
It would be very useful in my view, to allow the asset browser to display the content from the current file, even if objects/materials etc. are not marked as assets.
There is currently no easy way to see all materials present in a scene apart from the quite small material selection menu. In a scene with dozens or even hundreds of different materials, it becomes very hard to manage. In fact, it is very difficult to find a material without knowing its name to search for it. This would be the perfect solution to this problem.
Ontop of materials, it would also be very handy to have all of the scene's node groups accessible at a glance, as well as GeoNodes, objects, etc.
1 Comment
I relate to that from recent work experience. I had lots of models to prepare and then lots of scenes to layout, and I enjoyed using the asset browser to quickly populate the layout scenes and assign many materials and whatnot... But having to first spend quite some time just creating the assets - and do it again for each new asset - was quite a noticable bump on the creative flow, and it adds-up time on the final bill. And I didn't have the need for a library since it was a one-time project, I only needed to enjoy the UX of the <asset-browser → scene> for a few hours.
And even when I do make libraries for more long-lasting projects, it gets a bit complicated compared to other solutions elsewhere. The current state of things require to have multiple editors open, do quite a few back and forth for each asset, it requires a bit of experience to know how to optimize the process and reduce the click-count.
If all it took was a checkbox to see current existing data-blocks in the asset browser, and from there be able to bulk-manage all data-blocks and make assets out of them or add them to the scene, that would drastically speed things up for everyone.