In a presentation of Plumiferos, I saw the guys behind it describe a trick in which they actually have the currently open scene use a whole building from another file. They used it to allow a modeler to work on the building, while the animators did the surroundings (which included a lot of animation, of course).
The idea that you can have several scenes all using a specific object from an external .blend file seems brilliant, but I can find nothing about it anywhere. Anyone know something??
The feature you might want to look into is the append option under the file menu. It allows you to extract objects or pretty much whatever you want from an external .blend file.
There’s an option in there somewhere to make it link to another file instead of copying the data, which lets you model something in one file, place it in another, and then go back and change the original, and have the changes propegate to the second file.
You use the File/Append command, then when the Append dialog (load library) appears, enable the “Link” button on the bottom of the dialog (instead of the “Append” button)
That will load only a pointer/link to the data instead of appending the actual objects.
When you use that “Link” button, you will not be able to move the objects though … unless you use the new “Proxy Objecs” feature in 2.43 as described in this thread :
Yeah, I have noticed that. I installed the build with Jahka’s (insanely amazing) static particle upgrade, and the two are running completely seperate from one another. I will probably give that a try soon with the 2.43.
EDIT: Just read through the info on Blender.org again. It occured to me, are there any good tutorials on proxy objects out there at this moment??
Nope, not that I know of, other than that thread I referred you to and the brief stuff on Blender3d.org that’s it
I’ve been playing with a bit and it’s generally straightforward for simple objects (buildings etc). It works pretty well for armatures too, but I’m running into a few minor weird things, I’ll post my findings in that same thread. At the moment I’m playing with the “New NLA Walk” features and trying to figure out the nuances.
