I need to animate 12 characters that are almost identical, sharing most of the mesh and all the same rig appearing on the same scene, linked from the same .blend file. Hot to do that?
My researches so far are not positive:
Everyone says that there is no way other than copying the same blend file 12 times or other solutions even worse! This will be a nightmare every time there is an update on the mesh or rig. I will have to recopy the file 12 times and maybe relink and be open to many possible issues.
Blender has been used in many animation projects and I find it hard to believe this is what everyone is doing.
I’m very hopeful that those links are outdated and someone will come here and show me some light. And thanks in advance for any help.
This issue is supposed to be resolved in 2.8 eventually. I just found out on the Blender cloud about it. So it is then possible to link multiple times.
Well, that’s a big shame. One thing I wanted to know is how studios handled that. But no matter. So far I “automate” the proccess of making multiple copies of the file every time I change something and this is working reasonably ok, if very clumsy.
I think these studios use addons to accomplish this. I’ve never used this, but maybe the Crowd Simulator addon makes this easier.
@LordOdin says that his studio uses in house tools to manage scenes with lots of instances:
I don’t know if they share that with the public, but you could ask him if their tool is available on github or something like that.
I have the feeling that this was a technical limitation in the older versions of blender. There might not be any easy solutions you can use for this in 2.79.
