The BlackBox library was one of my main reason while I learned scripting. It always bothered me that Maya doesn’t come with a proper asset library system, or lets say flexible system that is usable in a production environment.

The idea was to create a tool that allowed me to save object in a location that I could choose and access the from a browser in Maya.

Thats all what it is, the library points to a folder that you can set. If an asset gets saved it creates a folder with the according name and saves a .mb file, all the textures connected to the object if needed, a preview image and an info text file.

The library will now show the preview image in the browser and if you double click it, it gets imported in to your seen. If you need more structure you can create more folder and sort your objects that way and build a really nice library

 

It was a huge pain to write this tool because it intensely scratches the edge of what mel is able to do. After I learned python I realized how hard I made it my self and probably how much faster the tool could be.

 

Maybe on day I will revisit the hole problem and try it with python