File browser

An asset manager is a tool to visually browse assets.
Useful when a studio has thousands of assets, and the assets do not have a thumbnail, or are hard to search in explorer.

• a folder with 1000 .fbx files, unclear naming, and no thumbnails
• a folder with subfolders containing various files each. hiding the name and preview image

An asset browser speeds up finding the right asset instantly, by providing a search and visual preview.

suggested features

• search bar
• favorite
• easy load / import / open file
• categorize
• thumbnail
• add content root paths, or add single asset path

Blender¶

• Blender has a file browser, which is basic and similar to the experience in explorer.
• Blender has an asset browser, which is slow. It needs to load all the .blend files to generate the thumbnails. And it requires assets to be marked as an asset in the blend file.

• Various 3rd party asset browser addons exist, mostly as N-Panel feeling a bit clunky.

• The perfect asset manager would

  • support thumbnails for a huge amount of files, near instant.

Maya sample

• https://github.com/leixingyu/assetManager
• 

Backlinks¶

• unity-editor-spotlight
  • A search bar, to help search assets in Unity.
    Still works, updated 2024
    repo https://github.com/Team-on/unity-editor-spotlight
• Unity asset searcher-
  • see https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/search-overview.html
• thumbnails scroll window
  • file browser