Download

Download the easily installable Blender Add-on here:

Asset_Flinger_Add-on_v0.1.zip

• It includes some nice ready-made CC-0 / Public Domain / 100%-free-for-commercial-use assets.
• Click here for the installation instructions.

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 :)

— Manu Järvinen

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 / Issues

• When using Your Library, the Asset Flinger menu displays the whole path to your library. Should be only the folder's name
• When Tool Shelf (T) or Properties (N) panel is open in 3D view, you can't toggle them off after you've launched the Asset Flinger menu
• 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.
• While using Asset Flinger in quad view or other types of layouts that have multiple smaller 3D views, the menu appears to all of them.

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