

Support for this in Blender means that these thumbnails never go missing or out of sync.

The old system didn’t support preview images at all there were add-ons that tried to add this functionality, but those also had their own issues.

Or you can go the other way, and keep all your data in a single file: the scene, the character, the animation, and all the poses as well. This means that it can contain other data as well, so you can link in a character from some other blend file to render your previews. The pose library file is just a blend file with Actions marked as Asset. There is some functionality for that, so keep reading this blog post to find out. Of course it is sometimes easier to just write a pose to some other file without ever closing the current one. This makes things predictable, and gives you ultimate control over what goes into which blend file. White blocks are data-blocks, the blue blocks indicate asset metadata.īlender will continue to work the same as before, meaning that it will only write to the blend file you are working on. Schematic overview of the work, character, and pose library files.

After the work is done, the Action is removed from memory again, so it won’t show in Blender’s regular Action select boxes. If there are any bones selected, it is only applied to these bones otherwise the entire pose is applied. When applying a pose asset, the Action is loaded from its blend file and applied to the current Armature. This makes it possible to give each pose its own thumbnail and tag it with the appropriate character(s) etc. In the case of the Pose Library, every pose asset is its own Action. The asset system has been described in the Asset Manager blog post, so please read that for more details. Any asset that is stored in a blend file in such a directory will be available to you in the Asset Browser. In Blender’s preferences, any directory can be added as an asset library. Data blocks, like Objects, Meshes, Materials, Actions, and even entire Scenes, can be marked as an “asset”. To give a quick overview of assets in Blender: an asset is “a data-block with meaning”. This blog post will show off the new system, and compare it with the existing pose library. It is the first practical extension of the Asset Browser, also introduced in Blender 3.0. Blender 3.0 will ship with a new Pose Library system.
