I’m having some problems with proxy objects. If I create an object in a blend file and animate it, when I link it from another blend file, it keeps its animations, but I cannot move it or edit its pose, so I have to make it a proxy. Seems that when I convert it into a proxy, animation info is removed from the model. So finally, after break my head against a wall, I’ve decided to animate again my model in blend file which uses the proxy, but I can’t declare animation modifiers associated with my proxy object and I need to create a cyclic animation… What can I do?, because I’m feeling there is no intuitive way to use proxies… or they have less power than they seem and have lots of troubles.
EDIT: I can add animation modifiers, but Cycles Modifier seems to do nothing… and I have tested Cycles Modifier on a box in same scene and it worked as I spected (movin the box up and down in an endless loop)
Proxy objects are annoying me with network render too. Any pipeline to network render proxy objects from a windows client into an ubuntu server/slave?
It does seem to be kind of buggy. I tried your test. I made a cube move up and down with a Cyclic modifier. I saved that out to a file. I open a new file and link that cube into my scene and it moves up and down. But I want it to move left and right now so I make it a proxy and animate it left and right. I was able to make it Cyclic no problem. So that part worked for me. But I thought, now I want my original cube that moves up and down in my scene so I link another copy of the cube into my scene and a Blender impossibility happens. I now have two cubes listed in the outline with the same exact name. This should never happen. All Blender objects must have unique names (that is why you see that .000 added to the end of copies). I think this naming issue is the root of the problem and is probably a bug that should be reported. But I am quite new to proxies and this may be normal, but confusing, operation for proxies.
Quite honestly distributed asset management is like object orient programming, in a large staff situation is is beneficial, but when it is just Me, Myself and I, the hassle hardly seems worth it.
In first place, I apologize because I didn’t explain my problem exactly. The fact is that I can do what you do as well. But when the proxy object is an armature, the object itself can be animated (object mode), but the bones and helpers inside armature’s object (pose mode) seems to be not affected by animation modifiers at F-Curve Editor window. You can animate that bones and helpers, but when you have to create a cycle (walking cycle for example) and you try use a modifier, it has no effect. That’s why I said I can’t add modifiers.
I could animate manually a cycle and copy-paste keyframes along timeline, but I think this sucks :-D, mostly when having 1K Frames and there is a KeyFrame every 10 Frames (means 100 copy and it’s not handy) and 16 bone helpers to animate…becomes hell.
Talking about distributed rendering with Network Render, a collaborator of mine has found a temporal solution. The problem was in relative paths and internal .blend names. Now, we have fixed .py code but we don’t avoid name collision, that’s why I’m not copying the code here, cause may crash easyly when having no care about internal names.
I would like to use network render because this way I can send a render and keep on working on next steps of my workflow. In the other hand, I should be waiting until render finishes. I know there is more software solutions for distributed rendering, but outside blender’s workspace.