Hello,
It’s pretty weird that you’re getting these numbers, I just checked on a production ready character (semi realistic, cartoony character) , rigged with material , shape keys etc… my .blend is about 8.7Mb compressed, 32Mb uncompressed…
Do you have any clue why yours are so huge ?
About what your asking (bundle blend) it’s tricky as the .blend file is a dump of the memory for faster saving/loading… It’s unclear how much work it would take to have everything split, and it’s likely to make loading much slower…
The idea has been brought to the table on a few occasion but I won’t hold my breath on that…
Anyway, if your animation project is organised the standard way, that is one file per asset each of which is linked to some shot files, your concern should be more about renders than production files.
For instance, on that project : Boon & Pimento : Cartoon series made with blender
assets take 7.6GB (~2700 files .blend and textures)
shots take 32GB ( ~22 500 files : .blend, movie/storyboard, sound file) and this also include some versioning on shots, so one shot could have 2<–>40 versions…
That’s basically around 40Gb for production files, and from memory the renders was more about ~2 Terra-bites of data and it’s likely that we did some cleaning halfway during the project…
On top of that it was pretty lightweight as we didn’t do layer/pass rendering, only one beauty pass straight from blender. However we kept several versions of each shots until one episode was considered done…
Hope that helps to put things in perspective !
Have fun !