I have a character, with rigging and animation, that I’ve developed in one file and would like to bring it intact into a second blender file with a scene I have worked out. Everything I’ve done only brings in pieces.
aiki
The easiest thing is to put all the objects, character meshes, armatures, etc, that you want to append into group, and then append the group. You’ll find grouping in the Objects and Links tab in the objects buttons. When you go to append the group into the file you want to work with, open the filename of the .blend file that you want to append from, and look under “Groups” for the group you want to append.
Appending is the simple way to do this. When you do this, the two .blend files are totally separate and independent of each other. You’ve basically made a new copy of your character. Editing one won’t edit the other. Linking creates a more solid connection between the two. Editing the original .blend file’s objects will change the object in both files. To link with an armature that you want to animate, you need to use proxy objects. This shouldn’t be necessary if you’re doing all your animation in one or two files, but if you have multiple files to work with and want to still be able to update the character throughout all of them, check this out:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-243/proxy-objects/