I do a lot of concepting with blender’s 3d sculpting tools on objects that are linked. As soon as I finish a stroke, all the linked objects to the object I’m sculpting on will update. When the objects update, blender will freeze until the update is finished. The more faces to update on all the objects, the longer the freeze is. The duration of this freeze is acceptable until the total number of faces of all objects reaches around ~1.5 million.
My question is: Is it possible to somehow manually update the linked objects on command whenever I wish to see the whole concept holistically, and not have to worry about the performance issues of the automatic updating while sculpting?
What I’ve tried already:
Linking from another file and using the “reload” function. It works partially, but the problem with this is that I can no longer use modifiers. Modifiers are important because I use them to provide some variation of the “base” mesh actively. This is extremely useful when I’m concepting things that only vary in proportions, such as fingers, toes or vertebrae using lattices. Appended is an image to give you an idea how I work with it. If it’s possible to use modifiers on linked objects from separate files it would be solved, but to my knowledge it’s not and at best you can make some temporary changes that disappear on file reload.
Hiding the linked objects improves performance somewhat, but it is still slow.
If you have any idea how I can manually update linked objects in such a way that I can still use modifiers on them, have a better solution, or even an idea for a better workflow in general in regards to what I’m doing I’m grateful for any time spent sharing your thoughts.
if you work in two files, you could only link the mesh you are sculping on. that should give you freedom to put any modifiers you like on there.
Another way would be to use the ‘remap Users’ funktion in the Outliner when right clicking a Mesh. It replaces all links to one meshdata to another.
So you could duplicate the mesh without links, make alle the sculpting strokes you need, and then you can remap all users to the duplicated, modified version of the mesh afterwards.
The only problem with this function is that the selection field is not searchable, so if you have a lot of meshes, it gets near impossible to find the right one
Thanks, linking the mesh instead of the collection works. Not used to working two files, though it’d be a bit more powerful if I could link a whole collection and apply modifiers on its meshes since I could add more objects that way and they would immediately be on the correct transform in the file. Something like that wouldn’t happen to be possible right? There is no way to use modifiers on objects in a linked collection?
you can add library overrides to your collection. after linking in the collection, go into the outliner, use the foldout so you can see the linked collection in the instance, open the context menu and go to
‘Library Override’ > ‘Make’ > ‘Selected’
Then you get a collection you can see into. Now you nee to do the same to the objects in that collection, you can select them all and rightclick once. The result should look something like this:
Then you should be able to add modifiers to your objects, duplicate them, etc. and they should still update when you reload the links.
