Reference/Release Notes/3.2/Pipeline Assets IO

= Pipeline, Assets, IO =

Asset System & Asset Browser

 * Collection assets are now supported
 * An automatic preview image is generated when using Mark as Asset.
 * Collection instancing can be toggled in the Adjust Last Operation panel after dropping to the 3D View.
 * Ability to drag materials (from Asset Browser for example) to Material slots in Properties editor.

Wavefront Obj I/O
New experimental OBJ importer. 

The new importer is written in C++ and is much faster than the Python importer, while using less memory as well. Import time comparisons on several large scenes:


 * rungholt.obj Minecraft level (269MB file, 1 object): 54.2s -> 5.9s, memory usage 7.0GB -> 1.9GB during import.
 * Blender 3.0 splash scene (2.4GB file, 24000 objects): 4 hours -> 53s.

Experimental OBJ exporter: Speed improvements. .

Export time comparisons between Blender 3.1.1 and 3.2:


 * Suzanne, subdivided to 6th level (330MB obj file):
 * Windows (32 threads): 6.0s -> 1.0s
 * macOS (10 threads): 3.9s -> 1.2s
 * Linux (48 threads): 6.2s -> 1.4s
 * Blender 3.0 splash scene (2.4GB obj file):
 * Windows (32 threads): 45.5s -> 3.9s
 * macOS (10 threads): 27.2s -> 5.5s
 * Linux (48 threads): 33.4s -> 4.4s

Media Formats
Blender now has support for the WebP image format which works similar to PNG but compresses faster and generates smaller file sizes.