Introducing: Private Projects

Blender Cloud members can now create personal private projects here on the cloud!

What is a project?

A project is a collection of files, assets, comments and general data of your own Film, Game, VR project. It could also be a simple collection of textures or shaders.

How to create a project

Simply visit cloud.blender.org/p . On this page you will see a list of your existing projects and you will be able to create a new one by clicking on the New Project button.

Once you have clicked New Project, you will see an interface that allows you to edit it, where you have to specify a description and summary (these fields will become optional in the future). You can also set a header and thumbnail preview for your project.

How to add files to a project

After updating your project settings, you can go Back to my project and start adding folders and assets. To do so, click on the New button in the header and choose Folder or Asset. After clicking, you will see a form where the asset can be edited. For example you can provide a picture preview, as well as a file item.

Note: the reason why assets and files are not a single entity is to provide more advanced functionality in the future. We understand that right now it might feel redundant and we are working to make it more transparent.

Please let us know in the comments or at cloudsupport@blender.org if you encounter any problem or if you have any questions!

Technical details

Here are some more technical notes about the implementation of projects and assets.

A project has a number of attributes that can be set via the user interface:

• Name
• Summary
• Description
• Picture Header (optional)
• Picture Square (optional)

More attributes will be available in the future (sharing settings, node types).

What are nodes (and node types)?

Well, thank you for asking! Nodes are all the items that can be found in a project. Everything is a node: a file, a folder, a comment. They are defined with custom properties and accordingly presented to you. We plan to add support for new node types in the future (such as textures), allowing you to view and treat new items in a meaningful way.

Assets

An asset can be any file. Depending on their type (image, video or anything else) they are displayed in a specific way in the interface. The basic properties of an asset are:

• Name
• Description (optional)
• Picture (a preview of the asset, optional)
• File (the file itself)
• Status

Folders

Folders are a way to organize your asset. You can create as many nested folders as you want. The basic properties of a folder are:

• Name
• Description (optional)
• Picture (a preview of the asset, optional)
• Status

Coming soon

In the near future we will work on expanding the type of items that can be uploaded on the project, as well as providing you access to some of them directly in Blender! You can check out a more complete planning (asset versioning, Attract, etc.) here.

Limitations

This is a beta release and there are currently a number of limitations in the service.

• maximum storage quota per user is 10GB
• video files are not encoded, they are simply stored as files and they are served as they are
• file sharing with other users is not possible, but will be added soon

We are excited to make these new features available to our subscribers, and we hope this will help to push the Blender Cloud project to the next level. More is coming!