The asset browser
Find, preview, and drag your media and reusable building blocks straight into the graph.
The asset browser is your shelf of reusable stuff: images, video, audio, 3D models, splats, and the subgraphs and expression building blocks you've saved. Open it, find what you need, and drag it onto the canvas to start building.
Browsing and searching
The browser shows everything DNA has found in your asset folders as a grid of thumbnails. You can:
Search by name to filter the grid down to what you're after.
Navigate folders to walk through your library and project assets.
Adjust the zoom to make thumbnails bigger or smaller, and resize the sidebar to give the folder list more room.
Assets come from two places: your shared asset library (the stuff you reuse across projects) and the current project (media that belongs to the .dna file you have open). See The asset library and Projects for how those are organised.
Previewing
Click an asset to open or preview it. Thumbnails give you a quick visual read at a glance, so you can usually spot the right clip or model without opening anything.
Use search plus a comfortable zoom level to scan a big library fast. Bump the thumbnails up when you're hunting for an image by eye, down when you know the name and want a dense list.
Drag to create
The browser is wired straight into the The node graph. There are three ways to drop an asset in:
Drag onto the canvas to create a source node already bound to that asset, ready to cook.
Drag onto a socket to wire the asset directly into an existing node.
Drag a file in from your operating system — drop it on the canvas and DNA creates the matching source node for that file type automatically. Drop it on the browser instead and DNA imports it into your library.
DNA picks the right node from the file type for you, so an image becomes an image node, a model becomes a 3D node, and so on. For more on importing from disk, see Importing media.
When an asset can't be found
If you move or rename a file outside DNA, the project still remembers it by a stable identity, so the link usually survives. If something genuinely goes missing it won't crash your work — it shows up as a magenta-checker placeholder and gets listed in the Missing Assets panel, where a Locate button lets you point DNA back at the file.
Projects reference assets by location-independent paths, so moving a .dna project between machines generally keeps your media linked as long as the files travel with it. See Package & collect for gathering everything into one place.