More flexible catalog management system for Asset Browser
The current system of managing assets through catalogs lacks flexibility and makes managing large asset libraries almost impossible. There are two significant downsides to the present managing system:
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A selection of assets that are saved in different Blend files cannot be assigned to a different or newly created catalog all at once. You would have to open each file and change the catalog definition there. This is heavily time consuming and impractical if you are dealing with multiple Blend files (which you will with managing a large asset library).
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Assets can only be assigned to one catalog at a time. However, users may want to assign the same asset to different catalogs.
Isn't the whole point of an Asset Browser to easily manage a large amount of assets/files and give maximum flexibility for future changes to their categorization? In contrast, the current system seems rigid and fundamentally limits the potentials of the Asset Browser.
This idea proposes to develop a more dynamic management system which allows to easily assign assets to different categories without opening their respective Blend file. This could be:
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Saving all the assets catalog definition independently in the asset library text file and therefore making the assignment of assets to catalogs more intuitive (assignment through drag and drop without opening each blend file)
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Introducing categorization by nested tags instead of a folder structure. Whereas an asset can only be assigned to one catalog atm, it could appear in multiple categories.
5 Comments
I agree, I just tried to categorize an existing asset library from scratch and having to enter each and every blend file to assign it a catalog was very cumbersome and I can only imagine that getting worse at scale.
plus, one would like to show the same asset in different catalogs. Say you would have assets grouped by their type (e.g. furniture, electronics, vegetation etc.), but you would also like to create catalogs by scenery (e.g. warehouse, office, garden etc.). This way of organizing assets significantly improves the workflow as you would more quickly find the right assets for a new scene. Quixel Bridge could be a reference for this (think sceneries are called environments there)
2 years have passed since this has been posted and it's still the same, we really need an update to the asset browser, at least let us move assets between different catalogs without having to enter their files...
This would be so good! Being able to have assets assigned to multiple catalogs would be a game changer for architectural visualisation work.
For example having a chair, table, decorations in a general furniture catalog but also in a catalog with a set of assets that that fit to a specific interior style, ie "minimalistic scandinavian design".
How about being able to save the assets as individual files with their own extensions? You wouldn't even need to open blender to organise them, and blender can use the file structure as catagories.