Quick Tip: Creating Reusable Geometry Nodes Assets in Blender (Patreon)

We’ve talked a lot here about building tools in Blender using Geometry Nodes. A while ago we made a curveu attribute creation tool and in just the last article we built a node graph to transfer attributes.

What if we want to reuse these tools in other projects? Copy/pasting between Blender windows doesn’t work and recreating the same graphs from scratch is big time waster.

Asset Libraries to the rescue! Using them we can save all our custom Geometry Nodes graphs and easily access them in any future project. The workflow is a bit, uh… special, so let’s learn how to do it as painlessly as possible.

Setup

For demo purposes, let’s pack up our attribute transfer tool.

The first step is to place all our nodes into a group:

This is a good opportunity to expose some of the tool’s parameters to Blender’s GUI, much like we would in Houdini. Blender’s system isn’t as flexible, but it gets the job done for simple setups. In this case we’ll connect the parameters we want to expose to the Group Input node. These parameters are now available in the UI, meaning we don’t have to dive back into the node graph to access them.

Select the newly-created group, right click the Fake User icon and select Mark as Asset.

The asset will now be listed in the Asset Browser in the Current File, where it is Unassigned. 

You can click the plus icon to add a new Catalog for organizational purposes. Then simply drag and drop assets between catalogs:

If the panel on the right isn’t visible, click View > Asset Details. There you can update the asset’s name, description, tags and other metadata. You can also add a custom icon in the Preview section.

When everything is ready, save the whole scene to a folder where you’d like to store your Blender libraries.

Finally, go to Edit > Preferences. At the very bottom select File Paths and add a new Asset Library pointing to the path where we saved the scene. You can double-click the name in the list and type in a more descriptive name if you want.

That’s it! The attribute transfer asset we created will now be available any time, anywhere. Just drag and drop it onto an object or select it under the Geometry Nodes Add menu.

Conclusion

Being able to reuse Geometry Nodes tools is a big productivity booster and, once you get the hang of the workflow, it’s pretty easy to do. Note that the same approach can be used to store all kinds of other assets: materials, models and more!