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Blender Asset Browser Integration

If you pledge 5€ or more in the Advanced Nextcloud Access tier you can access the materials, atlases, decals, HDRIs and 3d models directly in blenders asset browser.

Downloading

The first step for this is downloading all the asset files. You can check the Getting Started or Downloading Files sections to find out how to download the assets.

Setting up the Asset Library

Once the asset files are on your hard drive, the setup is super simple:

  • Open Blender.
  • Navigate to Edit -> Preferences.
  • Scroll down to File Paths in the menu bar on the left.
  • Add a new entry in the Asset Libraries section.
  • Give the collection a name of your choice and set the root folder (/Assets) as the Path.

You can then open a new Asset Browser window ...

... and see the Blender assets under the path All/ambientCG in the menu to the left.

Note

If you are using virtual filesystem of the official Nextcloud client then the first load will take a bit longer because all the .blend files containing metadata and the thumbnail images need to be downloaded from the cloud first. You can check you operating system's notification tray for a notification showing from the Nextcloud client to monitor the download progress. This only needs to be done once since the files are being cached in your local storage.

Performance Improvements

Even if all the asset files are already downloaded, loading them into the Blender Asset Browser might take a few moments, simply due to the sheer volume of assets (more than 15000 when including all resolutions!). This is especially true if you don't store the assets on an SSD and instead use a spinning hard drive or on a local network share (NAS).

To combat this, there is a way to improve the performance by only loading a subfolder. If you only ever use the 2K-JPG variants of the materials, then why even load the rest? You can simply change the library path in the Blender Preferences (see above) to a subfolder like, /Assets/MATERIALS/2K-JPG and only those assets will be loaded. If you want multiple subfolders loaded (for example /Assets/HDRI/4K in addition to the materials), you can simply register two asset libraries and their paths will get merged in the asset browser, so that the experice stays identical.

You can quickly check if a directory is suitable to being used as an asset library path by checking if it contains a blender_assets.cats.txt file:

If this file is in the directory, you can use it as an asset library inside blender's asset browser.