I been using Blender for a while and done a lot of configs to it and installed a lot of different addons. I would like to install a fresh Blender with defautl configs and no addons so I could compare the workflows and re-evaluate the addons and keyconfs. I dont want to just nuke the old stuff and replace it with new because I still have to be able to do my work.
Is it possible to have two blenders both with different configs and addons?
I tried installing the portable blender but once I launch it. It has all the same confs and addons as my main one so it didnt work as expected Any ideas?
Simplest solution is to compare your setup to a default one with two different blender version. Like 4.0 and 4.1, those versions have independent configs on your drive. So you could eg backup your 4.0 config folder to another location. Next time you start a 4.0 version it will recreate a fresh config. You could use that to compare it to your 4.1 custom setup then.
The other not-as-simple solution as @Debuk mentioned is the solution that i use (it is only slightly more complicated to set up, but only for the initial setup), is by using an application template, that way you can use the same Blender version. but there are some caveats:
Some complex addons, especially the ones that add something to the UI, don’t always play nicely with app template, so it is preferable to have your simpler setup as the app template.
If you choose to put the complex setup as the app template, it is safer to use an argument ( --app-template [name of the template]) in the Blender shortcut so the app template is loaded as you open Blender, and…
If you want to start a new file while in the app template, it is safer to choose the related app template new file, not the general one.
I’ve been using it this way for almost 4 years, the default setup is the one i used regularly, and i have the minimal setup with only built in addons activated for teaching Blender to my students, and another slightly custom template when messing around with Serpens.
*ps: i just realized something, sorry for the recent file name, as i already have so many test.blend file in my default save folder, i use whatever name that starts with test…
So it seems you used the same (sub)version which by default use the same directories…
See also Docs-Blender Manual: …blender_directory_layout … it ends in the Major.Minor version number…so all Minor.Subminor–versions share the same directory (when not using the environment variables).
Hi,
best thing are Templates.
On my Linux machine I’m using at least 5 different Blender custom templates with different config but the initial creation is not so intuitive and easy.
A good explanation video is this:
Yes, this is the only way I run Blender. Download the zip version of Blender, extract it and then go into the folder. Inside, you should see a folder that is named after the major version of the Blender you downloaded. Create a folder called config inside of it. Now it’s a “portable” version of Blender. I don’t know which folder it uses if you have installed the same version of Blender at a system level but it might still use the config in %APPDATA% if you’ve already run it. You should be able to move this somewhere else, even into another copy of Blender or the same portable one you setup if you want to keep the settings you already have.
Recent versions of Blender have a setting in Preferences for addon folders but I prefer to use a startup script to add an additional addon folder to the path automatically for each major version of Blender. You put it in the scripts/startup folder. You can find it over in this thread:
I prefer a script because I already have to set a bunch of preferences for every major version and anything that minimizes that is worth more to me.
Any ideas?
