AssetBrowser

A qt asset browser for applications like houdini/nuke/maya/blender

Currently in development only hdri assignment to selected environment light nodes (houdini)/read nodes (nuke) works.

The assetbrowser is written in Python 3 and does not work with Python2 anymore!

Install

To install this tool set clone this repo into a local folder. (e.g. D:/Documents/).

Houdini

Modify the jsAssetBrowser.json file that the jsAssetBrowser variable points to the plugins/houdini folder in the local clone of the repository (absolut path). Copy the jsAssetBrowser.json file to the $HFS/packages folder. (e.g. D:/Documents/houdini18.0/packages)

The Asset Browser can be added as a Panel using the Python Panel Edit Tab Menu option (cogwheel top left of panel). And add the "Project Viewer (projectViewer)"-Interface to te Pane Tab Menu Entries.

Nuke

Nuke Plugin Manager

It's recomended to us the Nuke Plugin Manager. See the following link for a more indepth description:
https://github.com/jonassorgenfrei/NukePluginManager
You can find the necessary jsAssetBrwoser.json file in the plugins/nuke folder.

Manual

To append the plugin to nuke, you have to add the required paths to the nuke init file. E.g. add the following to your <user home directory>/.nuke/init.py file

import nuke
import sys

jsAssetBrowserPath = "<PATH_TO_THE_JS_ASSET_BROWSER_ROOT_DIR"

sys.path.append("{}/src".format(jsAssetBrowserPath))
nuke.pluginAddPath("{}/plugins/nuke/scripts".format(jsAssetBrowserPath))

Note: the AssetBrowser does only work with Nuke 12 and later due to the dependency of PySide2.

Maya

Until finding a better way it's possible to run the Asset Browser in maya (without functionality). Runnig the startUp.py in maya after adding the maya folder to the python path.

Blender

Not supported yet.

Plugins

This Module allows to add plugins for custom websites or specific file data structures/bases.

To create a plugin create a new folder for the plugin in lib/jsAssetBrowser/plugins and append the name to the plugin in plugins.json. Note the main module file must have the same name as the folder e.g. myPlugin/myPlugin.py and needs to implement a Plugin-Class which implements the abstract PluginInterface class. (see: polyheaven as example)

In futur versions the json file will be created on runtime to manage plugins given the ability to enable or disable plugins.

The following plugins are currently implemented by default:
polyhaven - https://polyhaven.com/

Developer

Qt

When changing the resource file in jsAssetBrowser/ui/*.qrc the file needs to be compiled.

pyside2-rcc <ressourceFile>.qrc -o <ressourceFile>_rc.py

It then can be imported using

from jsAssetBrowser.ui import <ressourceFile>_rc

Where <ressourceFile> is the file name for the resources with the ending .qrc

References

Kudos to Mix Training on youtube for giving the idea and some base structure in the awesome tutorial series https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FoEykOrdgt4&list=PLAnSvhIvNZCtUz7-yOrBugM59Y_jixwWR