This is very exciting! Soon you will be able to browse and download content from the Blender Cloud - from inside Blender!
Sybren shows a quick preview of the upcoming Blender Cloud add-on, to access assets and textures directly from Blender!
This is very early work in progress and will change by the time it's out, but it's fun to share!
I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.
5 Comments
There are a number of potential problems.
The older blend files are basically incompatible with Blender 2.77 and will take a lot of work to make them compatible.
Most of the older files are Blender Render. These will be great for those still using Blender Internal, but it will take some effort to update them to Cycles. Still, I think some of the files will be incompatible with Blender Internal as well.
The characters and rigs are at a professional level and not very useful to novice and amateurs.
I think this is a great idea, but I also thing that the addon should advise people what is and isn't compatible. I don't know how to do this other than the Blender Cloud making that determination in some digital format and the addon making the downloader aware of the limitations.
In other words, clicking on an asset might advise the view that this file has these limitations for Blender Internal and Cycles.
On the other hand, I've found the textures category of Blender Cloud to be excellent for everyone.
I think it is going to be a real challenge to make this addon informative to the user's needs.
If there's one thing I hope they also take into consideration sometime in the future, it's for support for local networks and interactivity between local networks and the cloud network.
A team could access content from Blender Cloud, modify it to suit their needs (presumably with modifications held to certain quality standards), and send the modified assets between one another locally, and any of those members can conversely return such modified assets to the Blender Cloud as a new version of existing content, or an entirely-new asset.
I imagine the greatest advantage to such technology here is not just in accessing content remotely, but also in streamlining ease in seamless peer-to-peer sharing, which can be sent just as easily back to the cloud's remote servers.
On-site studios and virtual studios alike crave this sort of flow to production. A mode of global workflow without borders, basically. There are workarounds (like a studio using Dropbox), but nothing really with that sort of complete seamless sharing between local networks and worldwide repositories.
Just something I hope may arrive, some time down the road of development. Would be quite revolutionary.
Something like this sounds great - might require something like a "Blender file server" or integration with Git, but this sounds like the kind of direction they should really be pointing this plugin, and something that other software would emulate.
this is exactly what the goal of the cloud was from the start, eventually studios should also be able to create private accounts to share assets,manage shots, and farm render jobs.
Lot of challenges ahead, I'm sure.
But certainly, lots of potential, too.
Best of luck, guys.