Creating and Using Volumes

Volumes contain data that is used by a channel such as 3D models and other content. Most channels include built-in volumes that provide basic content for graphs. Users can also create their own volumes so they can add custom content to their graphs.

Creating a New Volume

To create a new volume, navigate to your organization’s Volumes table then click on the New Volume button in the upper right corner of the page.

This will display the New Volume dialog where you can give your volume a name and description. The name is a required field, it must be unique in your organization.

Click Create to create the new volume. It should now show up in the list of volumes for your organization.

Adding a Volume to a Workspace

To add the new volume to a workspace, navigate to the Workspace, click the three-dot icon and select Resources. This will open the Workspace Resources dialog.

Next, click on the Volumes tab of the dialog. Move the newly created volume from the Excluded column to the Included column. Click the Save button to add the volume to the workspace.

Adding Content to a Volume

To add content to the new volume, click the Libraries tab at the top of the Workspace, then select the Volumes tab under Libraries. Next, click on the name of the new Volume. For this example, it is called Demo.

This should drop you into the Demo volume. From here we can add new files and manage the current files. Right now the volume is empty because it is newly created and we haven’t added any files.

To add new files, click the Upload File button and select a file to upload using the Click here to select file link, selecting a file, and then click the Upload button. The file will be uploaded to the volume.

The new file will show up as a card in the Volumes Library window.

Next we can add this new file to one of our graphs to load the 3D model into a scene.

Adding Content From a Volume to a Graph

To add content from a Volume to a Graph, first create the graph and then click on plus sign in the upper left corner of the page.

This will display a pop-up with two tabs - Nodes and Volumes. Click on the Volumes tab and it will show a list of all volumes you have assigned to the workspace.

You can drill down into your volume and select a file such as a blender file to be included in the graph. The display will look something like this for the NewCube.blend file we added above.

Clicking on the file will add a node to the graph that represents that file. What you can do with the file node and what you can connect it to depends on the type of file and is also channel specific. The Example channel supports blender files that represent objects to be dropped into the basket. We can hook the file node to Random Placement node as shown below.

Finally, we can Preview or Stage the graph.

Permissions

Initial volume creation will default to write permission. Once you have uploaded all items to your volume, you can set it to have read or view permissions through the Volumes Resources Table.