Asset Flinger Add-on – Simple Mesh Importer
Oh SWEET! Manu Järvinen has created a really nice asset manager for Blender, including a preview renderer. Give it a try!
Manu Järvinen writes:
Hi everybody!
I released an add-on for Blender called Asset Flinger.
Most of the code is from my developer friends, which is awesome :)Demo-video:
Asset Flinger
Asset Flinger is a work-in-progress Free Blender Add-on for simple mesh importing via graphical menu. It’s aimed at 3D modellers who constantly import pre-made 3D assets from their libraries for building their highly detailed creations.
The Add-on also includes a drag-and-drop thumbnail generator for .obj files for Windows and Linux. (Although it should be eventually quite easy to generate the thumbnails inside Blender) Find here the development files for Mac OS X that almost worked)
Some history:
This add-on was made possible by the efforts of a 3D modeler and 3 anonymous programmers on their personal free time. The project started a long time ago back in 2013 and was active only partly over time. There was some inspiration to develop it for the Blender Market’s Add-on Contest. Thanks to Blender Market for the Honorable Mention for Asset Flinger! One idea was to actually put it on sale to there. – However, the add-on never got finished and so it’s not polished enough in order to be put on sale. Also, the new awesome and extensive asset management system for Blender is slowly coming and going to render this add-on useless, so there’s no sense to keep this behind curtains any longer anyway.
It is now released as a free add-on. Feel free to fork it if you like. Although, contributions as pull requests to the project would be highly appreciated :)
Also CC-0 licenced .obj assets would be gladly accepted as contributions, and I plan on making and adding more of them – I’m very picky about their quality, though. Personally I like to use Asset Flinger for my daily modeling, regardless of its shortcomings :)
This looks really awesome! I was just wanting something like this the other day. I’m definately going to check it out.
awesome stuff.
correct me if i’m wrong but wasn’t the blender foundation wanting to do something like this soon-ish?
Yes, that was part of the RedCurrant project:
http://wiki.blender.org/index.php/Org:Institute/Open_projects/Gooseberry/RedCurrant
That sounds like some top secret FBI mission or something!
Jaw-dropping
As far as I’m concerned, having too many attempts at solution for a problem is only a good thing. Sometimes one solution attempt does something the other didn’t think of, and vice versa. Perhaps your work could do this. In any case, thanks, Manu.
Totally agreed. I’m not sure of the RedCurrant status, but the beauty of an open source community is that people are free to take parts of each other’s work and combine them into something better!
this addon is what Blender has needed for a long time, a simple way to save and access assets (without digging through .blend files). It works like a dream and as importantly it’s beautifully designed and well thought out.
I’ve seen the images of the working being done on red current asset management and I’d have to say they should definitely exploit Manu’s awesome Design skills because it doesn’t look half as good as this.
Thank you for the awesome words!
I’m very glad you like it :)
mj
Great work!
I’m hoping there will be support for .blend files in the future as well (especially for linking objects), but it’s already incredibly useful as it is. I always found searching for assets on the harddrive a big workflow killer and this goes a long way in resolving that issue.
Hi! The addon is Fantastic! I have an issue with the Thumbnail maker/exporting process. When i started making all the previews, i noticed that even if the objects were squared (like some tables and other furniture) a subsurf modifier was applied when rendering, making most of the model previews useless. Any thoughts?
Hi!
By using a text editor you can easily disable the subsurf. Let me know if this works for you:
http://i.imgur.com/byfZk1b.jpg
This should be build-in to blender. Awesome.
I agree. A good asset manager and a small collection of built-in assets like good materials would go a long way, especially for new users.
Agree with what everyone’s saying here, would be brilliant if Blender had something like this by default. The current system of linking isn’t great, i.e:
– If more than one copy of a linked group is needed, you need to create another copy of the blend containing the asset to be linked (or have an alias/shortcut/soft link to the file).
– If the files are moved around, there’s no obvious way of re-linking the assets…
– The process of making linked objects editable with proxies is quite confusing, especially when first starting out.
Really like the UI of the addon Manu, simple, intuitive, great.
I just had to say I’ve learned a whole new world of python poking through this addon’s source code. Great work, and who knew something like this could be done ahead of the foundation itself :)
Cool, excellent!
:)
All thanks to my programmer friends
Is there a way yet to scroll through lists of assets that appear on screen?