Thumb Mate for Blender

Thumb Mate helps with creating customizable thumbnail previews for object assets in the asset browser.

By default these asset previews are only rendered using the workbench render engine and therefore are often insufficient for representing the object due to it’s limitations.

Thumb Mate renders the asset preview using Eevee with full control over the used environment and viewing angle. The previews can either be created upon marking an object as an asset or when updating the image.

Watch the Overview Video

Compatibility

Blender 3.0 and later

Version

0.4.0 (Blender 3.0 and later)
0.5.0 (Extension for Blender 4.2 and later)

Installation

1. Download the add-on as a ZIP-file.
2. Open the Blender Preferences window by choosing Edit > Preferences…
3. Select the Add-ons tab.
4. Press Install… and select the downloaded ZIP file. After successful installation the add-on should be visible in the list.
5. Activate the add-on.

Usage

Creating new assets with custom previews

1. Open the Asset Browser.
2. Select one or more objects in the scene which are already assets or should be marked as assets. Alternatively you can select the enclosing collection to process all objects inside.
3. From the Asset Browser’s menu choose Render > Render Selected Objects.
4. To render a collection and mark it as an asset select the collection and choose Render > Render Selected Collection.

Update the preview of an already existing asset

1. Select the asset in the Asset Browser.
2. Choose Render > Update Selected Asset or press the Update button located in the asset’s preview area.
3. You can also select multiple objects in the scene and choose Render > Render Selected Objects.

Geometry Nodes Assets

To create a preview image for an asset representing a Geometry Nodes tree:

1. Mark the Geometry Nodes group as an asset.
2. Select the asset in the Asset Browser.
3. Select the object to which an instance of the asset has been assigned to.
4. Choose Asset Browser Menu > Render > Update Selected Asset.

Preferences

All settings responsible for the rendering of the previews can be found in the add-on preferences in the Blender preferences window.

By default, the city.exr of the built-in environment images of Blender is used for the background, but any custom image can be used as well.

Other settings include the camera angle, focus length, clipping and frame padding.