I downloaded a building and made a sign to put on it. Bringing the sign objects into the building file took longer than making the sign :’(
First I couldn’t move them then I couldn’t see them in the renders. I wanted to have the sign file open in one instance of blender to change colors while looking at the building file in another instance to see the updated colors but they would not update without closing and re-opening the file. Refreshing the link didn’t work. In the end I had to do everything with copy and paste and revert because it was the only quick thing that worked reliably.
I’m hoping I’m just stupid and good tutorial on the subject will fix me.
I havent watched any tutorials specifically for this but you will find the blender conference talk by Daniel Bystedt extremely helpful.
And actually there aren’t many things that you need to know within blender to do this effectively.
Basically maintain a seperate file for each asset and assemble your scene in a seperate blend file by linking items. In your case this means that your building and sign should be in the same file. Or if you prefer to keep them seperate and decided that you going to change just the sign and not touch the building at all, then you can link the building to the file containing the sign instead of other way around.
If at all you want to change something about a linked model – be it materials, position, scale, etc. – you can do a library override using the Make Library Override operator (this wont be convered in the talk). Once you make a library override, you can individually override specific things in you model. In your case you can change just the sign and leaving everything else linked and referred from the original file.
There isn’t a good tutorial that I know of on that subject,
Indeed as you’ve experienced , you can change something in one file and have the update in real time in another. You have to reload to see the changes.
Personally, I would have linked temporarily the building in the sign file to make color adjustment in context.
Linking is a necessary evil on big projects but it as some drawbacks and indeed you have to make some back and forth between files instead of just changing stuff all around.
It’s a tradeoff between having to update everything manually between all the shots or going back and forth on some files and having all the updates for free.
I clicked every “make local” menu option there was on several occassions and nothing about the selected linked object or collection changed at all. It this system just very buggy or something?
Make local creates a copy of the linked instance in the current blend file and will no longer get updated when you make changes to the original blend file. This is equivalent to appending an asset in the first place and is genrally not a good idea.
Whereas the Make Library Override operator on the other hand maintains the links for all things that are not overriden in the current blend file. For example, you have you sign mesh with a red material in your asset file and you link it to your layout file, override just the material to green colour, any changes made to the material in the asset file will not get reflected back since it is overriden in the layout file. But if modify the geometry of the sign, it will get reflected to the layout file but your overriden material with green color will still be intact.
This method is way superior to other methods that exist in blender but as you asked, this is relatively a new and work in progress feature. Not all properties are overrideable yet. But they are being added day by day lately. You can find more details in the answer I attached.
