Asset Assistant 0.6.6

Asset Assistant 0.6.6

A Blender add-on that keeps your game assets correct and walks the pipeline
with you: diagnose, retopologize, unwrap, bake, export.

Added

• Tabs in the panel. The tools are grouped by pipeline stage — Textures,
  Mesh, UV, Bake, Export — so only the current stage is on screen. The chat
  stays visible below them, and an action opens its own tab: press Export and
  the export tools are already there.
• A doctor for the mesh. Nine checks: triangles instead of quads,
  non-manifold edges, holes, doubled and loose vertices, poles, needle
  triangles, no UV layout, no material, and how far the face count is from the
  budget.
• Retopology with a budget. The budget is a number, not a preset. A quad
  mesh is built from the sculpt, pulled back onto it so the silhouette
  survives, cleaned up and reported. The original is never touched.
• A LOD chain. LOD1…LOD3 next to the object, each half as heavy as the
  previous one.
• Texture mapping survives the export. Texture Coordinate → Mapping → Image Texture chains are moved into one UV layer per object, so FBX and GLB
  carry the same picture Blender shows.
• Albedo is baked as the base colour (through an Emission), not as
  "light + colour" — so it no longer fades, and metal works too.
• UV overlap repair by real geometry: only the islands that actually
  conflict are moved.
• Apply a folder of textures to existing materials in one click.
• Two new presets: laminate and plastic, with controllable nodes.

Fixed

• The export crashed with FileNotFoundError when the target was a .blend
  path or the folder did not exist.
• Baked albedo came out washed out. It was baked as COMBINED, with the
  light and the shadows baked in. Measured on a cube with base colour
  (0.8, 0.2, 0.1): (0.968, 0.627, 0.541) instead of the expected
  (0.906, 0.485, 0.349) — now (0.906, 0.486, 0.349).
• Baking an already baked material produced Wood_Dark_Bake_Bake.
• Mapping was lost on export. The FBX exporter does not record which UV set
  a texture uses, so the engine sampled the wrong one.
• Tab labels showed the key (tab.TEXTURE) instead of the name.
• UV overlaps were detected by bounding boxes, which gave false positives
  on diagonal islands.

On a real asset

A 211 618-triangle sculpt with no UVs and no materials → retopology with a
20 000 budget → 3 632 quads in 2.4 s, sitting 0.00 mm off the original
surface. The original mesh is unchanged.

Numbers

	0.5.9	0.6.6
Tools	40	46
Chapters in docs/	23	28
Headless checks	17	19
Presets	16	19

Install

Download asset_assistant-0.6.6.zip, then in Blender: Edit → Preferences →
Get Extensions → ▾ → Install from Disk, pick the zip and enable
Asset Assistant.

Requires Blender 4.2+ (tested on 5.2 LTS).

Asset Assistant 0.5.9

Asset Assistant 0.5.9

A Blender add-on that tells you which of your game assets are broken — and does the rest of the pipeline for you.

Blender is wonderful for making game assets and terrible for keeping them correct.
Nothing warns you that the normal map is in sRGB instead of Non-Color, that
the texel density on one island is twice that of its neighbour, or that the
texture file you linked two weeks ago is no longer on disk. You find out when
the engine complains — or, worse, when it doesn't.

The doctor

AI → Material Doctor reads the whole scene and reports what is broken and
where. Twelve checks:

• data maps (roughness, metallic, normal, height) in the wrong colour space;
• a normal map wired straight into Base Color instead of a Normal Map node;
• texture files that are gone;
• meshes with textures but no UV layer;
• absolute paths and unpacked textures;
• a shader the exporter cannot express, displacement without subdivision;
• duplicate and unused materials, maps of different resolutions.

The safe ones are repaired for you (Doctor → Fix); nothing is deleted.

With a hundred objects in the scene, this is the difference between hunting for
the misconfigured one and being told.

The pipeline

• PBR from folder — a folder of maps becomes a material, assigned, with the
  right colour spaces. A second run updates the material instead of creating
  Wood.001.
• UV — unwrap, even texel density, a shared atlas with padding, and a UV
  kit: the layout as a PNG plus a manifest (the atlas size, the gap, the
  density), to paint in Aseprite or Krita and bring back — without the UVs ever
  being touched.
• Bake — a procedural material turned into textures (albedo, normal,
  roughness, AO), written to a folder next to the .blend, with a plain PBR
  material on the object. The file names can follow the game convention
  (_col, _nrm, _rgh).
• Textures — pack everything into the .blend, make the paths relative,
  relink lost files, fix the colour spaces.
• Export — GLB and FBX with the axes and modifiers the engines expect. The
  readiness check runs first: the tool refuses to write a broken file, and the
  button puts the findings in the report.
• Presets — 16 procedural recipes and 16 hand-written layered materials
  (oak, light and dark wood, dry and peeling-bark wood, chipboard, tree
  cross-sections, clean / scratched / worn / rusty metal, asphalt) to start from.
  The words of your request are matched against the keywords in the code, so
  "дубовое дерево" finds the oak one without the model guessing.

The agent

The same tools, plus a chat that sees your scene:

• every request carries a snapshot of the scene, focused on what you are
  looking at right now, plus a section of problems the model cannot see (lost
  files, data maps in sRGB, textures on meshes without UV);
• the model calls any of the 40 tools by name and reads back what actually
  happened instead of guessing;
• 8 skills carry the knowledge it should not improvise — the exact socket
  names of Blender 4.x/5.x, colour spaces, PBR wiring, the procedural recipes.
  They attach to your own words, and every code sample in them is executed in
  Blender by a test, so an instruction cannot quietly drift away from the API;
• when no tool fits, it writes the code and Run code executes it in the
  scene, with Undo;
• destructive tools never run on their own: the chat shows a Run / Cancel block
  and the turn stays open until you decide.

What it does not do

A small local model does not invent beautiful procedural materials — and it
should not: the presets are hand-written for that, and the model picks one and
turns its numbers.

The buttons need no model at all (the doctor, the UV tools, baking, packing,
the export). The model is a multiplier, not a foundation.

Install

1. Download asset_assistant-0.5.9.zip (below).
2. In Blender: Edit → Preferences → Get Extensions → ▾ → Install from Disk,
   pick the zip, enable Asset Assistant.
3. For the chat: a local model (ollama pull qwen2.5-coder:7b) or any
   OpenAI-compatible endpoint — the base URL goes in the preferences with
   /v1 and without /chat/completions (the add-on appends it).

Requires Blender 4.2+ (tested on 5.2 LTS).

Tools	40 — each one a button, a model call, and a headless test
Doctor checks	12, 4 repaired automatically
Skills	8, with runnable code samples
Presets	16 hand-written materials + 16 procedural recipes
Headless checks	17 scripts running the real code in the real Blender