Hi there,
i am using Blender for a long time now, but not continously, rather now and then a bit. But after all those years, i now decided to focus more on Blender, and since my knowledge of the app has reaced something like a critical mass and working with Blender now is real fun.
Anyway, i am still struggling with a lot of details, one of them the organisation of scenes and objects. The concept of datablocks is still quite abstract to me, but i am slowly understanding. Due to the fact, that the last application i was working with, was very structured and seperated objects which later got combined in scenes i was wondering if a similar way of working would be possible with Blender as well.
I was thinking about seperating the actors and props in my scene, and giving each of em a seperate scene where i can work on em individualy.
For example: I have a scene, where i have a table with an ball on it. I seperate the whole thing into tree scenes: one with just the ball in it, one with just the table and a third one where both get combined and where i also have a camera and lightning.
When i want to do modelling changes on the table, i switch to the Table scene, do there my modification, and they are also present in the whole scene, which i use for rendering.
Is that way of working with blender possible? Maybe it is even intendet, but i did not get it till now, so, sorry if i ask things which are common knowledge to a seasoned Blenderhead.
Best regards,
Heiner
PS: if there are tutorials or stuff covering this topic, a point in the direction would be highly apprechiated!
I think what you want to use is called layers in Blender. There are twenty layers. You can move an object to a layer, and when only that layer is selected, only that layer can be seen/worked on. In object mode, the layer selector looks like a couple of egg crates, with ten buttons per crate.
One of the ways I use layers is to keep most of my objects on layer one, then move the object I’m working on to another layer, when I’m done, I move it back to layer one.
There are other options for working on complicated scenes. One is the “local” tool. Select something, type /, and everything else disappears. (type / again to get everything back.) This is simpler than moving an object to another layer then moving it back.
When you are working on a complicated object, you can hide selected vertices by typing h, typing alt+h will unhide everything hidden. You can also use alt+b to box select a viewing region, everything outside the box will be invisible.
You can also use the outliner to make objects invisible using the eye icon in the restriction column.
I was thinking the same thing, that layers are what you want, but scenes can be helpful, if you want to be able to see an object, but not be able to grab or manipulate it. you can do this by moving stuff to another scene, and then, over by where you specify your render directory, use the little arrow keys to specify ’ scene to use as a set '. then if you need to send things back and forth, use ctrl L. once you’ve copied something to another scene with ctrl L, you can delete the original if you want.
You might also look at blender’s linking capabilities; that way you can e.g. have your table in one .blend and use it in multiple other .blend’s. Info in the docs.
I haven’t played much with this and it gave my some headaches when using a render farm, but I guess it’s very powerful if done right.
Happy blending,
Björn
You can link an object to two or more scenes at once too, so if you want object 1 in scenes A and C and object 2 in scenes B and C you can just do that too, but layers are probably easier for smaller amounts of objects.
You can also put an object in more than one layer at once (M command) but that tends to confuse me so I don’t. You can activate as many layers as you want so it’s unnecessary generally.
You can also pick layers using the 1,2,…,0 keys and various modifiers (shift = multi, ctrl or alt = bottom row, etc).
Hmm, about what Modron said; I wonder if the ‘selectable’ and such buttons in the outliner are per object or per scene, if they were the latter that would give you yet another way to make things only changable in one place.
and the suggestions. As far as i can see, the option of linking different files into one “mater file” is the solution which comes closest to what i am looking for.
I am a long time user of Animation:Master, and one thing i really love is the achitecture, which keeps objects seperate, exept for actions and scenes (which are in AM called Choreographies).
Naturaly i am looking into any option how i may make Blender more “comfortable” for my needs and habits.
Again,
Thanks for the help
Heiner