Asset Flinger

Asset Flinger is a 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. (Works on Windows, Mac and Linux - Note, however, that the Thumbnailer For Mac doesn't work. Find here the development files 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! One idea was to put it on sale to there, actually. - However, it was never finished and so it's not polished enough in order to be put on sale.

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 accepted as contributions, and I plan to keep 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 :)

— Manu Järvinen

Download

Download the easily installable Add-on with some ready-made CC-0 / Public Domain / 100%-free-for-commercial-use assets here:

• Asset_Flinger_Add-on_v0.1.zip

Demo

Video:

Screenshot:

Usage

• Add a mesh asset via shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A
• Export your own mesh asset to the library via shortcut: Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E
• Supports subfolders
• Supports .obj file format and .mtl materials (object material slots are remembered)
• For generating the asset thumbnails (doesn't work in Mac OS X yet), user can drag-and-drop .obj files to the provided Thumbnailer python or bat file. New instance of Blender will render them in the background.

Installation

Installing the Add-on :

1. Download the package
2. Open Blender
3. Go to user preferences > Add-ons > Install from File...
4. Navigate to the downloaded .zip file, click Install from File...
5. Enable the Asset Flinger Add-on from the checkbox
6. Save User Settings
7. Try it out :) Ctrl+Shift+Alt+A opens the Asset Flinger menu in the 3D View

Setting up library location for your own assets:

1. In the Add-ons panel in Blender's User Preferences, put your own Asset Library location to Asset Flinger Add-on's preferences
2. Export your 3D models to the library with Ctrl+Shift+Alt+E
3. Make that location as a bookmark for your convenience

Preparing Asset Flinger Thumbnailer (sadly, quite loborious :/ - Also, doesn't work in Mac OS X yet)

1 . Unzip the Asset Flinger Add-on's .zip file and find the Thumbnailer folder for your system

2 . If you have installed Blender to default location, skip to step 5

INFO: these are the usual default installation locations for Blender:

• Windows: C:\Program Files\Blender Foundation\Blender\blender-app.exe
• Mac: /Applications/Blender/blender.app/Contents/MacOS/blender
• Linux: /usr/bin/blender

3 . Navigate to the following file and open it into a text editor (in Windows Wordpad is recommended), make the change and save:

• Windows: thumbnailer\Windows\Thumbnailer.bat
• Mac: thumbnailer/Mac/Thumbnailer.app (right-click>Show Package Contents) /Contents/Resources/thumbnail_maker/config
• Linux: thumbnailer/Linux/Thumbnailer.py

4 . In the Thumbnailer file, change the path to where your Blender is located, save and close

Note to Windows and Linux users, if you want to move the Thumbnailer to a different location, move the whole folder because it contains required hidden files. Mac users are free to move their single Thumbnailer wherever they want.

5 . Try to drag your .obj from Your Asset Library to the Thumbnailer like shown in the video. A nice thumbnail should be rendered.

In Linux, at least Thunar file manager supports Drag&Drop, you may need to install it. Also, you might need to right-click the .py-file and make it executable in order to allow Drag&Drop

6 . Done, everything should work nicely!

Tested

Asset Flinger has been tested and proved to work on :

• Blender 2.70 (Windows 7, MacOS X 10.10 Yosemite (except Thumbnailer), Ubuntu 14.10, Xubuntu 14.10)
• Blender 2.72 (Windows 7, MacOS X 10.10 Yosemite (except Thumbnailer), Ubuntu 14.10, Xubuntu 14.10)

Known Bugs

• When using Your Library, the Asset Flinger menu displays the whole path to your library. Should be only the folder's name
• When you set up a wrong path for Your Library in the add-on's Preferences, you get an error message when using the custom path in the add-on in 3D view. Also, the 3D view goes a little darker and doesn't go away until you restart whole Blender
• While in the Asset Flinger menu and doing an Alt-Tab to switch programs, and then coming back to Blender, the menu appears to all open 3D views. Very annoying.

Feature Ideas

Easier to add:

• Remembering the last used asset folder where the user picked the asset last time
• Easy Add-on preferences checkbox for the above 'Remember last used asset folder'
• Easy Add-on preferences checkbox for hiding the asset file names in the asset menu to make it more compact
• Easy Add-on preferences setting to choose the amount of columns for the asset menu to make it more compact. (In the code there are already easy parameters for this)
• Easy Add-on preferences setting to choose between the current Normal (128x128) and Small (64x64) sized thumbnails to allow for more compact view. (In the code there are already easy parameters for this) - OR - if this appears to be hard to realize, then simply providing 2 choices of the Add-on with the different sized thumbnails and thumbnail-generation settings

Harder to add:

• Instant and Automatic thumbnail rendering for exported objects (no need to leave Blender or setting up the Thumbnailer at all)
• Wrapping of text for long file names
• Scrolling of the thumbnails via mouse wheel
• Support for .blend objects and materials + their thumbnails