Hi everyone,
I made a free Blender extension called Blend Project Packer.
It packages a Blender project into well structured and self-contained folder or zip, so it is easier to move, send to someone else, archive, or render on another machine without paths and dependencies breaking.
The problem it tries to solve is simple: a .blend can work fine on your machine, but break somewhere else because some texture, linked library, cache, image sequence, UDIM, VDB, render output path, compositor output path, or add-on dependency still points back to the original workstation or you simply may forget to package an important dependency.
Download: https://extensions.blender.org/add-ons/blend-project-packer/
Docs: https://www.renderjuice.com/blender/renderjuice-extensions/blend-project-packer
Main points:
- runs locally/offline
- works on a copy, so the original
.blendis left untouched (doesn’t mutate original) - builds a portable and structured folder or zip
- copies external dependencies
- rewrites paths to portable
//paths - warns about missing files, risky paths, unbaked simulations, and add-ons that may affect rendering
- writes a manifest/report showing what was copied, rewritten, missing, or still needs attention
I originally built it for preparing projects to send to render farms for remote rendering, but the addon became generally useful for normal project handoffs, sharing project with teammates, archiving, and moving projects between computers too, so I shifted the whole thing to be generally usable for almost any use case.
It is not meant to replace good project organization. It is meant to catch the annoying things that are easy to miss before a project leaves your machine.
I have tested the main cases I could think of, but still I can’t be too confident before I hear real feedback from everyone else. So what I would appreciate most is people trying it on real projects and telling me what does or does not work well i.e.
- something important was not copied
- a path was not rewritten correctly
- the packed project did not open or render as expected on another machine
- or any thoughts so I know if I am building in a right direction
Any feedback is welcome!