If you go to an object’s properties there is the option at the bottom to add custom properties. Just doing a quick test I was able to add an “Owner” property with my name and an Hours property with modeling hours which is a numerical field so you can toggle the time up as you work on a model. I don’t know what an easy way to access the data is but at least it is attached to the object.
But do custom properties have an actual impact? I thought it required an actual custom script to be more than a very small note…?
I guess it depends on what you want to accomplish. I think the good thing is that the property remains with the mesh, so if you import it into different scenes or if you have many objects in a scene you just select the mesh to view who built it, etc. The 3D View Object Property Chart add-on lets you view the selected object’s custom properties in the 3d window.
I think these are a (very intelligent) foresight of the 2.5 designers. The options for storing information in objects, meshes, materials and God only knows what else (the tab constantly seems to show up :)) will be a goldmine once proper uses for it is found. But I think it would require some form of scripting, most definitely. With scripts, I bet some kind of super-file control, perhaps even the tantalizing ‘Director mode’, could be made possible, directly or indirectly.
I simply lack the detailed vision to see how to get there 
Edit: On a note, stvndysn’s cool discovery has sparked my serious interest, so I posted this thread in Basics & Interface. Because it’s ‘Interface’. Sadly, being very non-basic, I fear it will go unanswered. If anyone knows an expert on the matter, please feel rfee to point him or her to the thread. Solving this question could pave the way for some insane possibilities 
If you’re working on a large animation project, having your own server (where you can control your own data) is superior to dropbox… to the point where I daresay it’s required. This is especially true if you’re working the ‘virtual studio’ angle. That said, to try it out, you don’t even really need a server, just Python. You launch Blender-aid using Python and then you can open your browser to access a local server that is automatically set up for you. It’s really quite nice. I’ve started using it for a few of my projects and I know that the Tube project is currently using it. You can see a brief article on their blog here: Drinking the Blenderaid.
The Tube project already aroused my curiousity, although I have been eyeing Blenderaid for a while now. I guess I just need to find a hole in my schedule to tamper with it for a while, it looks interesting (perhaps even moreso because I still have a hard time placing what it actually does, besides the nice and sleek project visualization). Are there other video tutorials than those at the site? They don’t have any sound, that’s mostly why I ask. I love to watch and listen to video tutorials while doing other things in my day (have to plug Creature Factory here, of course :D)!
I feel I need to immediately draw attention to this little gem, which builds on stvndysn’s little gem:
http://blenderartists.org/forum/showthread.php?t=202423&pagenumber=
It’s the second post (the one responding to my original post) that you need to look at!!
If any of you are skilled at scripting, I would like some advice/help on how to turn this into an amazing foundation for an actual Massive Movie Project script for Blender (and if possible, make it compatible with Blenderaid for that added visual and web-based front!)!
Hi, sorry for replying late, school is quite demanding (and Blender projects too;))
With this .project file, maybe it would be easier to change the name of the group you want to link to the main file without re-link it. Like for example in Blender you can set a parent to an object. If you rename the parent, it gets updated in the OB parent field of the object.(what everyone wants to do with linked assets)
And you could have a sort of outliner to visualize your project.
I have very poor programing skills so I don’t know how it could be done.
I may have found a way of doing that, thanks to some input from people in these forums!
And you could have a sort of outliner to visualize your project.
From what I see, Blenderaid does this far better than I would be able to with my knowledge and resources
I have very poor programing skills so I don’t know how it could be done.
My 2.5 scripting needs serious improvements, but I think I am slowly building up to it 
Multi-level linking continued…
I have been working on a scene for the Ninja Delivery ad (see sig). The linking is becoming rather advanced, and doing it for real projects rather than lab experiments is showing me things. For one, the level structure is less clear to me than I thought. For one, meshes are NOT seperate from materials, and cannot be brought in carelessly. An object created and then given a mesh (by switching the mesh in the Properties tab) will also have the materials of that mesh/object in its source file. The example I tried was bringing in a mesh of a Mustang. The mesh was linked as a mesh, not an object, yet when I switched it onto the local object created for the purpose (standard plane, nothing fancy), it showed up in matte metallic blue - the material it was given in its source file. I thought from earlier tests that it would show up without a material. Or at least, that the mesh and material were not bonded together. It turns out, I was wrong. Not only did the material (it never had any textures, only diffuse/color and spec settings) come along with the mesh, they cannot be broken apart; I’m stuck with the material until I do something in the source file. It is my (untested) hope that the material can simply be removed in the source file, allowing me to have the mesh in the link file and swap materials as I please. Dusty blue might not, after all, be the color I end up wanting in the final animation.
From this, it seems the way it works is this:
- Groups can contain anything, but they will contain it, no matter what. Even if you proxy something (like an armature) in a Group, you just get a copy of it. The copy in the Group will imitate poses and so on, but the proxy will not move with the Group unless made to do so (in a scene using a rigged character linked as a Group, I had to make the proxy a child to the Group to make it stay with it. Otherwise, the Group was moved, but the proxy stayed put).
- Objects Refuse to move when linked in (no manipulators, no reaction to either G, R or S). They bring mesh, materials and the lot with them, and you cannot changed them. This includes animation keyframes. Armatures linked in as objects keep bone keyframes (‘animated poses’), too. It also includes modifiers; if the object has them in the source file, it has them in the link file.
- A mesh linked in can be switched in as the mesh of any object in the scene. You cannot alter the mesh (no edit mode). Modifiers, even ones on mesh (subsurf, mirror) are not linked in with it; they appear to be attached to the object only. A mesh will, however, bring materials along. I have not tested if it brings shapes with it.
- An armature linked in as armature (not as object) does not retain bone animation. Also, it has to be put in the scene by creating an armature object and switching its armature (some new terms are really needed here…) to the one you linked in.
- A material brings textures with it.
This all clearly points at a strict datablock hierachy. I am hoping that the hierachy can be flattened in some way, so that I can combine mesh and material in the link file, rather than going through multi-level source files to do it. Of course, having source files with various pre-assembled designs could have advantages, such as linking in a completely assembled town from a source file (probably as a Group), whenever a scene takes place there, or linking in completely assembled characters. The pros and cons are still a bit complex to get a clear view of, but I am hoping that the hierachy is an option, not a rule…
@Pipeline: Hi, I see that you are going to test Blender-aid. If there are some issues, don’t hesitate to contact me. I am one of the core-developers of Blender-aid. I would appreciate if you gave feedback after trying, so we can see how to make it a better tool.
Greetings,
Jeroen
You’ll get the old Blender mantra: Documentation! I gave up figuring out what to do after half an hour of reading. I am still unsure what Blenderaid adds to a project, and the installation seems designed for programmers, not project managers or 3D artists, so I just put it on hold. And please don’t start just explaining it to me; instead, write a general explanation that can be used by everybody. And take care to explain it as if you are talking to a complete noob, because half the time, I felt like I would have understood everything if I had just heard the beginning of the conversation. Except there was none; you begin by making a lot of assumptions about my pre-knowledge.
You asked for it 
I just partook in a discussion of an annoying part of linking. I have known about it a bit, but never really experimented. It seems it is not possible to link two copies of the same Group into the same file. The second one just does not appear. If you proxy an object (so you can, you know, actually move it), another link of the same object also does not appear.
Moreover, if you duplicate a Group that contains an armature, and proxy that armature, any posing will affect every copy of the Group. You can duplicate Groups containing meshes, and have multiple copies of the same thing in a scene. But links seem to reference as a collective, not as independent objects; do only to one what you would see done to them all :eek:
More testing on the linking issue finally done. I made a copy of our human actor model/rig and linked both copies into one new file. The parts that are local to the human actor files linked in nicely, no problem. But the eyes, which are linked into the human actor model from outside, showed problems. Note the human on the elft, he has no eyes:
This is a serious issue in regards to multi-level linking. The first actor has both eyes because the original linked in eye was simply duplicated in the actor file. It seems to work just fine. However, the other actor has no eyes, because he was imported from a file that linked to the same eye file as his buddy there. Not being able to link in multiples of a source thus extends to background files; even if you are linking from two completely different files, they may be sharing sources, which then will trickle down and not show up right.
This is kinda bad