Blender 2.50 material library – request for submissions
Blender 2.50 will contain a materials library ‘out of the box’! That’s a very nice feature if you ask me. A call for materials has been posted on the forums.
A material library will be added to Blender for 2.5 we would like to invite the community to participate in this by donating material settings. In order to facilitate this, please provide a link to a blend file with a single material in it.
Link
Do they need to be created in 2.50?
NOO!!!!!! the reason blender is such a small file size is because of the bare minimum presets. IMHO this shouldn’t be added, but be available as a separate download.
Joe: Is that really necessary? 29-whatever megabytes is /tiny/ by today’s standards, anything under 50 megabytes is small in fact.
Tell that to my 3G internet connection which takes ages to download anything above 10-15mb.
This should be optional. Blender shouldn’t get the whole “lets put as much stuff* in there as possible”
(*=useless ‘value’)
Blender’s size has nothing to do with a lack of presets. We’d be looking at a few dozen bytes per. Even a few hundred would add kilobytes to the final filesize at worst.
I think this is a great idea so long as they don’t load it up with 1MB materials. They should try to use a good combination of materials that are useful, but efficient.
But this could go a long ways towards making Blender friendlier to newbies. Even just having 5 basic preset materials like reflective metal, wood, water, stone and plastic would be very helpful.
This is really a bad idea, IMO. What’s next, a library of ready-to-pose models inside Blender?
Just make it available as a choice, not as default, please…
I agree. They need to keep the size small. They can have a internal python browser point to the materials page somewhere. (like in XSI)
Yes, the problem isn’t the 500kb extra (most of us can live with that), but the whole can of worms that this action moves. Once you start adding these things, it becomes harder to maintain control.
Having a separate materials library is a much better option and you can put as much content in there as you like.
Why not to use existing repository:
http://matrep.parastudios.de
Guys, these materials are procedurals, and thus have almost no size.
Of course including some materials by default will not add to the download size but something similar to the effort by Meta-Androcto by providing all materials in a seperate .blend file would be much more helpful.
http://brendonmurphy1.googlepages.com/materiallibrary%27s
I’m all for a material library to be honest. Nice idea!
YEAH!! This was one of the first things that I missed when I first started using Blender.
Some nice SSS Materials for skins would also be nice…
I need to look back at some of my projects and see what I’ve created over the years.
I think that it would be great to have a setting that let you link up to a website and see materials that aren’t on my computer. in otherwords, something like what Word has for its clip art. It does a search on the online server and returns results directly to Word. It would be great if we could do this and save the materials we would need on our own system.
Because we already have the Materials repository and the material presets are an issue for low bandwidth users I think this is a good compromise. By the way, I should point out that even though the material presets themselves are small the preview image files can really add up! This would be another good reason to have an internet option, you would only be downloading what you need then and there and the download time isn’t an issue since a search would yeild only about as many returns as a small gallery site as opposed to a few hundred or so.
As far as I could tell the amount of new programming would be negligable, basically only changing the folder one would access for materials and previews to the material repository site. Of course my programming skills are also negligable so I could be wrong… still it would be really cool… it would also make collaboration much easier.
Take it easy,
Rob
Hey guys, for all of you complain about materials library keep in mind that many of them i’ll be with procedural textures so the size are insignificant!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
i Like the Sonix Car Library And BrianH Furs lib.
Material presets is a good thing,
In this case i like to mention Mapzone tooo!
http://www.mapzoneeditor.com/
This is free, not open source, ” most powerful texturing tool ever”.
Something like this in the texture node editor would be nice.
I really am happy Blender will get a material library. Hopefully the developers will use external .blend files to put things like Materials and Models in that can easily be expanded by users, including having your additional model libraries.
Also I hope Blender will get some centralized online repository to get additional objects and materials. This way beginners and professional users can find it useful and maybe even user added objects and materials will start taking off.
And for those people being disappointed because the increase of file size of Blender I can only say that even if all this adds an additional 5MB download, when you have it downloaded, it’s downloaded. The bigger issue is the bandwidth itself. But having materials included should not be based on the fact that Blender will be a 5 minute longer download. Also just adding 5 materials is not very useful IMHO.
Blender is growing up -finally- and I think the extra file-size outweighs the issues people seem to have. Sorry, just my opinion :)
But an addition of a connection to an online repository with Materials, Models and scripts would be super cool. Wether or not that will ever happen is up to Ton and co. Hopefully they consider that too!
Yes i agree that an inbuilt library will help a lot.
However, appending an external blend file is a feature that has really rocked so far. and thats the reason i love sonix car library and the meta-material library, both of which are mentioned on blender.org
wow cool this is a nice idea… porting materials to blender 2.50, what if people choose what to download like people download only the blender 2.50 itself or has materials library… so people don’t bother about file size.
Hmm well. This shouldnt add much up the filesize, because these materials aren’t supposed to be huge 1GB textures, as Streen and Agustin said, it won’t add much filesize.
So i’m in favour of this materials library
A suggestion.
Add every texture you can. I use a wide mixture.
A .blend for a material library is a good idea. But only if we can download the file like an addon, separately from the installer.
Another idea is the option to merge material library’s from other users, in our library. With this we can share with the rest of the world. :P
p.s.
Sorry for the lame Google Translation XD
It would be nicer to integrate downloading material libraries in blender.
When it has installed open a webpage on blender.com that shows some packs to download. And allow blender adding a material library by pasting a path or url in blender. Many people would love to add stuff on this convenient way.
Have it as an option, that is:
blender with the bare minimum.
You could also have blender with materials stuff in a folder and offer a folder or zip.
When installing blender could look for other material libraries in the folder and add/install them automatically.
But please don’t put stuff standard in blender, offer those packs on the download pages as seperate download.
Or bundle them with blender in a zip.
its a good thing, will help new users also, when i started id no idea or qiuick reference to what i should be doing material wise im quite confident now, but only through seeing examples in the first place, im also on 3G, even an hour download would be worth the wait, its f**king free, not that it will be all the data is is a few numbers. (hehe <– cleary not a coder)
I have to say that I like the idea of downloading packs of materials, kind of like the packages for Linux. That’s good because it’s familiar to a lot of Blender users.
The real advantage of this for people like me with a fast connection is not having to search through materials that we don’t need and will never use (which is why I like the idea of a built in search feature in Blender to download only the individual materials one needs)
*if blender size has to increase,torrents will be good idea in the future to solve low internet output’s problem
Like most things in life. The answer is in the middle of the black and white opinions expressed here.
It would be VERY helpful for new users to have a well crafted set of materials available out-of-the-box. From my own experience when you are learning a new advanced tool like Blender you need all the help you can get to remove the impediments to progress.
It would also be fantastic if there were a centrally managed on-line library of materials you could access from within the Blender UI. This would provide a great platform for contributors to donate their cool material setups to the community and an easy way for us all to see and use them.
So I would love to see both these facilities in Blender!
Just have the material library as a seperate download. I don’t see any problem with that.
Blender is a tool for artists.
Having bundled presets would be like getting a drawing pad with drawings already in the pages. I agree with it being in a repository instead, but not in the installer.
I think this is a great idea. A few really excellent basic materials out of the box (i.e. wood, metal, glass, rubber) would help blender 2.5 be even more accessible to new users right out of the box. Even advanced users would probably enjoy quick access to a few mats when you’re just prototyping or dinking around.
@Caster: Complete exclusion on some presets to help beginners get to grips with blenders material engine is a bit harsh you must admit, every other app has one, some are bad, and some are great.
Extended material libraries, yea, keep them online or as an option but to eliminate all materials in quite a puritan manner is a bit un-welcoming to users coming from other apps that do have a couple of base presets.
Bring the materials on !
they are just there to tweak them ;D
i have recently downloaded blender texture and materials cd from a torrent…,it took time but i am very happy to have it at reach of hand and out of the internet too
i have recently downloaded blender texture cd from a torrent…,it took time but i am very happy to have it at reach of hand and out of the internet too
@Castor: It is great that you feel so invested in Blender that you want to claim it to be used only by you and those I presume you deem are artists.
What are the rest of us to do?
Shell we remove Blender from our machines now and never darken its door unless we achieve artist status? I wonder how we should achieve that status without using Blender to learn our artistry?
Oh…before I forget…you may want to stop using any of the primitive meshes provided in the “add mesh” menu as these are like having a drawing pad with pre-made drawings!
Procedural shaders only take some bytes, not even kilobytes. Their size is negligible. Putting
Oh, for criying out loud, jaysis!!! Don’t be square heads and let blender be a nicer guy in those
little details!!! Its a great idea to have a preset material library, for a couple of another few FREE MEGS, of download!
Have in mind that the newcomers to ANY 3D SOFTWARE, are dealing IN FIRST PLACE, with the things that they HAVE IN the software, and don’t start surfing for libraries or presets by themselves to add by hand!
Only when you have knowledge of your software, and you have decided to use it in the long road, you start to customize it, THE IDEA HERE IS TO MAKE THAT FIRST CONTACT NICER, HANDIER, AND MORE INSTRUCTIVE.
So pleaase, don’t be so exclusive. HAVE AN OPEN MIND, MATES!
FOR BLENDER SAKE!
presets for everybody!
Procedural shaders only take some bytes, not even kilobytes. Their size is negligible. Putting a few presets in the UI wouldn’t harm anybody.
For new users (or maybe people who want to concentrate on lighting), material presets would be very useful. They could be interesting to study for beginners, and would make some tutorials a lot shorter.
Of course, the other ideas (accessing a centralized material repository, having “material packets”, and so on) are interesting too.
@EnV: Did someone say you will have to use these presets ? Even an already rigged biped would be the same use as an artist dummy.
@Bart: My last post was unintentional. Is it possible to delete it?
What an odd negative reaction … ??
Great idea! Bring on the presets!
(I wouldn’t mind some light rig presets as well ;) )
why such negative reactions?
just create two installer: the one with all presets (material, ui, …) and samples as the default. and the other is just the core package.
and maybe there will be online library? it will be great to have to.
Hi all,
we are not planning to make Blender bloated, just more friendly to users coming from other software and new users. Also make it easier to write tutorials etc. For everything planned to be added total download size should increase about 1 MB.
Env,
we actually do plan to add a few prerigged mesh models; and some models that are well suited for digital sculpting, and presents for brushes; and some lighting rigs.
LetterRip
Material library is a long long waiting feature!
I suggest the library will be stand alone and easily manageable to users. And the most important is upgrade versions of Blender will not erase the original library.
Something just like bookmark management in Firefox!!
Very great idea. I’m all in favor of it but I would advise to make some way of easily using this preset stuff. If it is like the present blender where you have to use an ugly file browser and going through a lot of mouse clicks to get to your library and append stuff… forget it. User experience should not be gambled. Its not like every one would like to go through all that willingly.
It would be nice to just have a menu or something that display the presets to get in one click. The ability to extend this would also be a plus.
As for size, that do pose a problem to others. Its okey for me to wait for additional minutes since you have to do it only once, but others may find it detestable. Others have given great ideas to solve it. They may seem minor but would be of great help.
As for Caster’s opinion, I don’t totally agree. I would rather think of these presets to be very much like premixed paint sold on art shops. By themselves they are just what they are… paint. It requires other materials, tools and the hand of an artist to be able to make art work. The great advantage to this “premixed paint” is that it free you from the labor of making them (which usually result to failure if you just beginning to learn how), shortens time required to finish a piece and let you concentrate on your creative ventures.
So I’m all for it, just make them simple to use, or they may end up ignored.
Exavolt and Ralmon thanks, yup, I totally agree…
One thing though, I would love to be able to have at least a folder with access to various materials that are accessible from within the program so that I could easily apply said materials without having to reconstruct them. I remember when I was a 3d noob playing with Poser and moving over to Blender because I wanted some real freedom with my modeling and material/rendering options. I didn’t even touch materials for ages because I couldn’t easily apply them to different objects. I was spoiled by Poser because it had preset materials that I could dissect and tweak then save associated with the program, not just a project file.
The reason I use Poser as an example is that it is so easy to apply materials and the library is so intuitive. I also agree with Charon with regard to the bookmark suggestion but I would also add that it would be a great idea to have thumbnails of the images side by side with the name.
Having a material folder like we have a Python folder which the program either generates or has a preview pic associated with the materials displayed in the ui would make it a lot easier to apply those materials to. likewise having an internal link to an outside library would make it a powerful program indeed… also, if the tweaked or totally new materials could be directly uploaded to the repository site we would have even more people using and contributing to it. I can’t stress how important tweaking the preset files was to learning how to make materials, and I would like to point out that Blender is, was meant primarily to be an educational tool. It may be used by professionals on a more and more regular basis but education is Blender’s prime mandate (to the best of my knowledge) and I would not have been able to learn how to make materials from scratch as quickly as I have if not for presets. if you want to have people scratching their heads while trying to learn how to make a volumetric material… just make sure not to put in any preset materials. On the other hand if you want a bunch of volumetric masters, put in some presets, it will help on the educational front immensely.
And while we are on the subject of procedurals… MORE!!! I love procedurals and I can’t tell you how often I use them! they make my life so much easier that I can’t even describe it.
Take it easy,
Rob
I’m sorry if I angered anyone over my previous view (so far I’ve ticked off 2 -I apologize, I’m not some elite blender artist :) ) sigh. Well, I’m OKAY with the material library inclusion, but I think it’d be great to have an optional installer without the materials and huge presets for those of us who have to worry about smaller bandwidths (yes we still exist)
I’m not trying to stamp out progress, but I’m just saying that bulking up the installer size turns a lot of people away. (at least have it optional… a setup implementation on the download page like the one present at graphicall.org (or .com?) would do nicely for users to pick whichever installer they need :)
I hate to be a naysayer on this, but I definitely think that in order for one to become good at Blender, they have to experiment on their own with procedurals. Once you start depending on other people to do work for you, you stop learning and growing. I respect the idea of trying to provide a good base set of procedural textures, but I don’t think that such is conducive to learning Blender well and therefore should not be part of the Blender build. That what repositories are for…
Alex Blank,
I can’t agree with you on that. I have become good with blender over the years but have used other apps that had more canned goods and have become better much faster with those apps. It is not that I cannot figure out how to make materials but at the end of the day if I can use and modify something that exists so I can get back to my family then that is what I will do.
I say great idea!
I think it’s a great idea. No need to reinvent the wheel every time. It’s also good that the file size would be small, but I too think that anything less than 50 mb is tiny for the vast majority of the userbase.
I really like the library idea.
To be able to manage, save and reload some of MY materials as presets would be great.
I would also love to be able to port my self-collected library of materials and objects and particle systems and animations and rigs etc. to new versions of blender.
Instead of appending datablocks from different blend files a workflow like: klick on the picture / icon resembling the data and apply it to the selected object would be great.
Also adding third-parties-elements this way would be great (like importing someones library).
Adding single presets from an online lib compatible to the datastructure used with this lib-manager would be much nicer than adding them by default. This way I could avoid cleaning the blender-presets-lib before setting the link to my personal one (after each download of a new version).
A lib-manager should allow to export and import in the most compatible format possible. Take this as a basis and add a button like: “browse for materials online” to blender. Now everyone can choose to download whatever they want.
To Alex Blank. Don’t agree with that. It would have been correct if you say “To be good in creating textures” but saying “To be good at using Blender” is different. Blender provides you with a lot of things: modeling, texturing, rigging, animating, post processing, etc. Being good at one does not means you’ll be good at others and of course not everyone is interested at every field. So for those who does not like (and usually is not good in) texturing, we have to somehow give them some easy and quick means to do what they don’t like (even if its not the best solution) so to make experience more pleasant.
If they want more than the presets could give, they could modify the presets or make from scratch (a feature that would always be available, but not necessarily attractive to everyone). Being able to make materials from scratch is always available… alas using and modifying presets, which many likes to do, is not as of present.
We are talking about a lot of users here. We can’t force them to do what we think they should do even if we believe it to be the best. Its not like they would like it for you to force it to them. Its like saying to the painter to create his own paint, for knitters to dye their own yarn, or potters to prepare their own clay (extreme but I hope the point is clear: convenience). Sure there is certain “learning” experience in creating them from scratch but not everyone like to do so.
Well, this is a useless flame war. Ok, to address a few points. . .
“Presets are only things n00b artists use”
This is just stupid. It’s not our job to try and *force* users to be good artists. A preset system could be a very powerful thing, especially if people could make their own presets. I think it’s also something that would help attract more people to 3d. Certainly relying on presets and never learning to make anything yourself is a real danger; kind of like how learning to draw specific angles of specific cartoon characters doesn’t help you much in learning to draw in general. But again, it’s not our job to *force* people to be better artists, and I think the positive aspects of this are worth it.
“No!! Blender doesn’t fit on a floppy anymore!!”
I can guarantee that blender isn’t going to skyrocket in size. A significant percentage of the development community were uncomfortable simply with the size increase from adding ffmpeg, which increased our binary size to ~10-12 megs. I think its safe to say that it’ll be a *long* time before we start shipping video tutorials with blender. :)
“This opens the door to all kind of badness!”
It’s fine, seriously. Blender isn’t going to become that-application-that-you-just-really-*hate* (for me it’s Maya). Remember that lots of the developers really do *use* blender, so when we break it we tend to fix it. :)
No offense meant to anyone. I just think this is a silly flame war.
Good, procedural, lightweight material library? why not!
BTW. The picture is taken from Luxrenderer material library – it’s a great example of how cool material library could be! Just pick your material in your web browser and it’s there, in your scene!
This is great to have, thanks for the initiative. Preset libraries smooths the learning curve and speeds up creation. Would also be great to also have a link to trustworthy third party sites for additional content if the user is looking for more. Just like we already have some nice links on blender.org but having those inside Blender for new users who are not sure where to find what.
I cannot comprehend the what process happens on a person’s brain to generate so much negative comments on such a great feature. It’s clear half of the comments don’t have the slightest idea of what they’re talking about and the other half come purely from emotional arrogance instead of logic. Human beings are hard to understand.
um, this is an awesome thing to have. 1 more MB is a problem??
I work with a guy who’s using modo lightwave motionbuilder etc and he keeps showing me all these features they have, for example modo has a material library. now blender keeps adding great stuff (like the material library) and an sweet new interface along with much more i dont even know about, and for the stuff i do its evening the playing field. for free.
and the #1 thing is it finally works on my little white macbook without crashing every 10 minutes! i worked through an entire summer with that, and finally its no more.
if it runs well, if it has great features, if it does the job, put all the extra megs on it you want.
I thought it would act like Sketch up’s model respiratory, you go to file, import from Material data base, it would connect to the internet, and you can pick the material, and it loads it into a new material
Do a set of basics Default Blender materials for display 1 of kind(wood,metal..),
create a new interface programming for user folder display of his materials ,
MATERIALS:
Default
Default1 | Default2 | Default3
screen screen screen
——————————
User Materials c:…
Material1 | Material2 | Material3 …
screen screen screen
——————————
OnLine Materials connect: yes?no?
An excellent idea – it’s far, far easier to tweak a good base material then it is to create something from scratch and a really good set of library materials will serve as examples of how to build materials. I kind of like the online repository-navigable from within Blender idea too, but licensing of materials and quality could be an issue. The submission of other peoples materials to the Material Repository always worried me!
+1 to a better mechanism of managing materials too.
Hallelujah! It’s about damn time. This is LONG overdue in blender. Creating projects is time-consuming enough. Having immediate access to a multitude of common materials will speed up production immensely, whether you like to create materials from scratch or not. Sometimes you just need to slap something on and move on.
This is LONG overdue…
I can’t believe the amount of negative responses to this. It’s a great proposal.
Most people will use custom materials for finished projects, but for previewing prototype work a material library with effective presets will be very valuable in terms of time saved. If in the final result the material is not up to standard, it can be improved or created from scratch.
I’m all for keeping the Blender download as small as is feasible, but the mere bytes that are used to store procedural textures is nothing to complain about. It might as well be argued that the splash screen is removed. This single image is most likely larger than the entire proposed material library.
I am all for the idea.
Kudos to the innovative spirit!
Fantastic idea! Max did this with its A&D materials and its extremely helpfull both for beginners learning what makes materials look real and also the pros who know how to do it and want to spend less time messing with basics.
This same argument came up recently in the modo forums, people were hugely negative towards the idea… now they have a masive database of said presets.
please don’t hurt blender by bloating it.. :[
please don’t hurt blender by making it useable.. :[
Material library… Cool.Cool
anontoo: lol!!
People forget how usefull being able to make presets can be aswell. much easier than loading materials
Excellent idea. This will allow beginners to try Blender and get hooked much more quickly. Experts can load a basic nearly-right material and spend much less time just customizing it. Even better would be an in-program download tool, that connects to the internet and shows you optional libraries, so you can download just the extra materials packs you want. The music program FL Studio does just this for (music) patches and samples.
Revised opinion:
Find material packs in itself is very useful.
But do allow everybody to choose between Blender (Slim version) and Blender with presets Blender(Filled version, needs a better name).
My worries aren’t about the bandwidth but getting stuff you don’t want.
If someone just wants to download blender without packs or so. It should be possible!
It’s a matter of freedom.
Being able to download blender with materials and stuff already in it, no problem. Have nothing against this.
I would love to see something like Blender Official Content Packs with carefully chosen stuff in it.
Wouldn’t mind letting blender during installation present the content packs. If they are in the installer show it in the ui, if not, show that they will be downloaded in the ui.
Just let me select/deselect anything separately from anything else that’s technically possible.
Wait, I don’t understand why this is such an issue. Materials are tiny, textures I admit will add some size but what’s everyone getting so worried about?
Maybe a solution is to have a materials folder that is preloaded when blender starts. Then offer the materials lib as a separate download?
But again if there are no textures being used, and mats are so small then what’s the issue?
As I said earlier this is a perfect idea. IMO
The joke is this- even if you have a preset material who is going to map it for you? Be careful what you wish for my beginner minded friends.
Default presets can be a good starting point to make your own materials and a great help for new users to understand how these things work. Assuming you can expand and customize these libraries, it’ll be quite nice.
Personally I see having the basics available on hand a good thing. Especially in the early stages of a project when you want to be able to quick slap materials on your objects to get a general idea of the result.
Think of it like photoshop’s default brush libraries. They’re a great starting point from which you can customize them to your own needs or add new ones as necessary. And you allways have the option of reverting to the defaults if your library gets corrupted or screwed up for some reason (as has happened to me many many times in the past )
The idea of having it downloadable as a separate package works as well as long as it’s easy to find. It also has the advantage of being maintainable and expandable at rates that don’t necessarily have to follow version release schedules.
edit : I like Dusty’s solution to the problem. Simple and elegant. But then I’m not all that familiar with how 2.5 will manage material libraries. It’s allways possible this has already been thought of.
Hey Tom (LetterRip)
I think that’s a great idea. And I love this idea here. I always keep up my own library, but having 200+ different files that are 99% the same data takes up more room and clutters my machine more than it would if it was one centralized download with quality control. Sure, I could go through and add each new material I download to one lib file. Every time I download them. Five, ten, fifteen at a time. But I’d also like to work on my project, instead of categorizing all my materials.
It’s not like these things are going to make a project out of the box. We’re not downloading pre-set themes and narrative hooks and out-of-the box action sequences. This isn’t a “My art conveys default message 16: Don’t do drugs.” download. It’s tools… tools!
Why don’t you just post two versions of blender? One that is “recommended for newbies” with a selection of presets, and a version for the purists or bandwidth challenged that is barebones?
If you want more users to try and like Blender it needs to be more user friendly than it is now. Just try Cinema 4d. Big and bloated, but you can get something done in it. I read somewhere that if a new user to a piece of software can’t accomplish something within 15 minutes, they probably won’t open the software again. I’ve accomplished things in Blender, but it took lots of time to learn the interface before I could produce anything. The worst part is trying to figure out how to load python scripts, font management, and creating and applying materials really is unnecessarily complicated. If there were a “preloaded” version of Blender to download, it would be a huge timesaver.
Why are some people complaining about this??? Having a material library in blender when you download it doesn’t mean that there will be materials in there, just the feature is there. Then all that would need to happen is that there is a folder where you would put any .mat files or whatever (that could be exported from the library) and they would appear in the library when you next run blender. You could also have it so that you can pack heaps of materials, and in blender, just import them to the library and it sets them all up for you!
When you first install blender and go to the material library, instead of seeing previews of materials, it would have a message, “please go to http://www.blender.org/materials/default.pack to download the default library materials.” This default list could then grow with the most used, and there could be a few options of different packs you can download (small, medium, large or water, fur, wood etc that would have materials of that type).
This way blender would not increase in file size, the downloading of the extra packs or materials would be where the size is, and you can choose what you want. I think that having to open a .blend and add them to the library would be ok, but I think being able to export a single material or pack of materials from blender would be easier.
I know it would be a huge effort, but what about an “online” part of the library in blender that would link to an online repository and show you thumbnail previews of materials (with a search feature etc) and you can choose to download them from within blender :P
Well, a few ideas anyhow…. I just wish I was good at C/C++ so I could help code some stuff like this. Just let me know if any PHP/mySQL/javascript/jquery will be of use here….
Yes, that’s great (and often desired)!
I think I know Ton’s opinion about file size, so don’t worry!
An online library that blender uses would make a better idea actually then including only a small subset of materials in the download. But only if the search and presentation of materials is good. Would love the idea to pick some materials and download a generated .blend with those materials in.
However, offering some options in blender flavours has some advantages.
The download page should have a few flavors of blender: Blender Core Blender Content Packs(just the .blend files), Blender Full(blender with the blend files in one convenient package.
Blender Core is a name for just blender without anything extra in it.
It would be handy for people who want to install blender on computers without internet connection (from e.g. an usb-stick) that they can download blender with the packs in it.
I’m bemused at many of the responses. I believe it was stated several times the added materials would add kilobytes (or bytes) of information, not megabytes. So, offering 2 different versions, a basic one that’s “11.2MB” or the HUGE OVERBLOATED DELUXE file with materials @ “11.4MB” seems a bit silly. Perhaps some just posted based on the header info w/out reading the posts, understood. :) If i’m incorrect on the appox amount of extra KB’s it would add, I’d love to know a ballpark amount and I”ll insert foot in mouth if it is MB’s in size :)
Once high quality (and large) assets are acquired, I’m betting the Devs already have this mapped out and presume the add-on(s) will be separate…that is, if acquiring such stuff is even in the plans. The blender community seems to do a decent job at this, alhtough a bit disonnected, you can find great stuff w/ a bit of research.
I think there’s some really cool suggestions w/ online viewing of mats, etc. Highlight the “devs” choice of the wk, rank by popluarity, and so forth you..Also someone suggested presets with basic lighting rigs. I think adding many basic presets (within reason) to the amazing different features blender has to offer would greatly increase the usability for those coming over to blender, for those who are either new to the 3D world or those arriving from other 3D software packages. The key is to make it accessable by removing as many road blocks as possible. It’s my opinion a small size material library hits this spot on. Kudos to the devs on forward thinking! :)
So… Blender 2.57a was just released… Where is the materials library!!!!!???????