Hi, all. I’ve got a (maybe weird) issue. At least, I wasn’t able to find anybody else mentioning it so I hope you can help out.
When I use File > Link, I’ve noticed that the linked Containers do not always import at the same location. I’ve got a brick material that has a “random” color controlled by the object’s location data. This linking issue poses a threat to consistency across multiple scenes.
Yes, I could get around this by creating multiple brick materials with slightly different hues and manually adding variety to my shots… but why not just automate it, right?? It’s so much easier. Well, if the objects would just reliably be where I left them in the reference file!
Anybody have any ideas how to keep the position data from my reference file when linking it into a new file??
When you link an object, it will be placed in your scene at the 3D cursor position. Many other data types, cameras, curves, and materials for example, must be linked to an object before they become visible.
Can you please show some screenshots that step through the process of what you’re trying to do? It’s easier than trying to grapple with technical terminology and documentation. I get the gist of your problem, but I would like to know more specifics, screenshots are great at displaying that.
But this knowledge will well you further down the road… I suggest you invest sometime learning it. Not only it will help you to learn different aspects of the Blender environment, as you’ll comunicate better with other users about other ‘technical problems’.
@JCA3D:
That said, a Blender scene is made of datablocks that are connected together, and understanding the relation between each datablock is quite important.
In your case, you could create a material that references the origin of an external object (an empty, for example), or instead of linking objects from another file, you can just link the meshes, and use your own object to reference the linked mesh.
Transformations such as Location, Rotation and Scale, are part of the ‘Object’ datablock, and they transform the referenced ‘Mesh’ datablock accordingly. If you just link the ‘Mesh’ datablock, then an ‘Object’ datablock is created in your scene, and it’s owned by that same scene (you can move, rotate and scale the ‘Object’, but as the mesh is linked, you cannot change the ‘Mesh’ because it’s owned by the external file).
Agreed, and I didn’t suggest that they shouldn’t learn it, but in this case there’s no way to determine if they’re linking objects, collections, using collection instances, using library overrides, etc. Lots of nuances that can affect it.
Sorry if it came off like I was saying that the technical terminology is useless.