2 questions on packing/unpacking files

Support Basics & Interface
1

I created a test file from big project I am working on…The original file has tons of textures/images located at different areas of my computer.

I took my master file… did a file save as and named it a different name. I’m now ready to pack these files, because I am going to take this whole file to a different computer for rendering purposes.

Here are my questions

  1. Does rendering slow down/ or perhaps speed up, if you leave the textures packed in the file (versus unpacking)? I was thinking about leaving everything just packed in this blendfile when I transfer it to this other computer.

  2. When you pack textures into a blendfile… does blender essentially make a copy of each texture file and leave the originals where they were at on your hard drive?

I just don’t want to mess anything up on my master file when packing textures, ect into this duplicate file.

2

Packing images makes things simpler in terms of having only one large file to transport. The other option if you don’t want to pack your images is to copy them to a single folder with the blend file and use “relative” folders, that way you don’t need to recreate the file structure of your original computer on the rendering machine.

-Rendering speed shouldn’t change with unpacked images unless some of the files are in slow drives or remote computers in a network.
-packing images will not affect the originals.

3

Thanks cegaton for replying. I kind of figured it wouldn’t effect the originals, but I just wanted to make sure. Basically I’m just going to use this second computer as a mini “un-networked” renderfarm :slight_smile:

I’ll go ahead and marked this solved.