Diary of Morn #08 | The Asset Browser

It's been quite a while since I last wrote a Dev Log or Diary of Morn entry, so today, I'm going to write about one of the two unsung heroes of my games creation and the biggest software change I've had in the past four years.

I am talking about Blenders asset browser. A feature introduced to Blender version 3.0.
What is Blender? Some people might know it already, but for others this term might be completely new. Blender is the 3D software that I use to make my graphics. The official website explains it like this:

Blender is a free and open source 3D creation suite. It supports the  entirety of the 3D pipeline—modeling, rigging, animation, simulation,  rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game  creation.

So, whenever you see an image or video in one of my games, it was made in Blender. Some aspects like certain textures, 3D scans, UI elements or video editing I do with different tools, but all the nice 3D graphics are inside of Blender.

What are 3D assets? A whole lot of different elements go into every scene I make in Blender. The final image you are seeing is comprised of characters in different poses, a bunch of 3D objects, textures, lights, effects and more. All of those elements are so called assets. The pillow on the ground? An asset. The lamp hanging from the ceiling? An asset. The pose Moran holds while reading the book? Also an asset. Even the light pouring through the window is an asset.

An asset is like an individual building block that, when combined with a bunch of other assets, creates the whole 3D scene. It can be a simple 3D model, but also a light, or a pose, or even a texture.

Over the course of a games creation, thousands of assets are created used and reused to quickly fill scenes or animate characters. using them, instead of creating everything from scratch, saves a huge amount of time. But, the more assets you have, the more annoying it gets to actually use them.
In the past, using a premade asset in Blender required you to locate the specific folder on your PC where that asset was stored and link it to the scene you are currently working on. Doing that once or twice is alright. but imagine having to link 10-20 assets to your scene. No matter how smart your folder structure is, it takes forever to do it. Which is exactly what I did for the entirety of MISTs development. But no more!

The Asset Browser. With Blender 3.0 came the asset browser, a new feature that allows you to save premade 3D assets in an easy to use browser, from which you can drag and drop assets into your scenes. No more manual linking. When you drag an asset to your scene, it's linked automatically. No more locating of any folders and searching for that one little 3D model you need but can't remember where it is saved because you created it three years ago.

The asset browser is the one place where all my assets are saved and has changed the way I work. It made things much quicker, feels more intuitive and even fun. Believe me, having all the assets you made in a huge list in front of you, feels like playing the sims with infinite money. It's basically like a game editor and it's great. But the greatest thing of all and what prompted me to write this post, is the pose library within the asset browser.

Posing a character is serious work. It takes forever. It really does. Getting poses to look natural, not clip into anything while still interacting with their surroundings, feeling like it's a real person with weight and not just a hollow 3D object is not easy. In MIST I was getting by with individually animating every single pose, because the poses weren't very natural or varied. But as I started to learn more about proper posing and started to steal knowledge from the gesture drawing world, my poses have gotten better and more complex. On top of that, CoM has a lot more renders than MIST did, which means a lot more poses to be animated. Doing it the way I did in MIST is a stupid amount of work, but the pose library comes to the rescue.

After almost a year of active development and half a year since the first version of CoM was released, I've animated a bunch of different poses and expressions like I did in MIST. All done individually to fit the scene as good as possible. In past Blender versions I would have just continued like that. At best opening old scenes to copy/paste an animation into the current scene. But with the pose library, all those individual poses I've created are now stored as pose assets. 

Last week, I finally took my time to organize them all and what you can see in the picture above is the result. I'm already at about 100 pose assets and that list is only growing with every new scene. Now I can drag and drop natural poses onto the characters and then refine them to fit the moment. And that isn't even the best thing. Because I use the same skeleton (the so called rig) for every girl in the game, the pose assets can be shared across the different girls. This is saving me from the endless folder diving of the past and I have to say. I'm really happy about it.

And that is the asset browser. A great addition to my work and a real game changer. I know that it's not the most fun or exciting topic to talk about, but these small things make an insane difference to my work and I wanted to mention them. The same goes for the second unsung hero of my games creation too. Maybe I'll talk about that one too in the future.

But that's all from me. I wish everyone a great week and you'll hear from me next Monday!