Project managmement tools for Blender?

Support Basics & Interface
#1

Hello everyone.

I have been playing around a bit in Blender for the past month, and one thing I’m missing from other packages, is a project management tool.

Most artists have a couple of projects running at any one time, and I can’t work out how you manage this in Blender. All files seem to default to similar places, and if you send them elsewhere, the ‘recent’ paths that appear in the dialogue boxes, are only there for that session. I see in ‘preference’ you can set your paths, and this helps. But is there a way to set paths based on different projects? Ideally I’d like to open Blender and it has all the links the ‘projectA’, but if I want to move to ‘projectB’ I can switch. How do people mange this sort of thing?

Both XSI and Maya have really good project management tools. You can even create new projects, and all the directories that you need.

Actually, that reminds me, is there a way in Blender to create all the folders Blender needs, in a new directory?

Thanks for your help, I’m sure this is something that must have come up on the open movie projects, and there must be some way of managing it. I’ll dig through available scripts, and see if I can find something. Thanks!

#2

If you click the updown arrow in the file box, Blender remembers the most recent paths used. In 2.50 you will have direct control over bookmarks.

Blender doesn’t need any folders like Maya. About the only thing we generally recommend is to use a Textures subfolder for image textures.

#3

Yea, but that list is cleared each time you restart blender. I’m pretty sure blender does need folders… how are you meant to manage several projects? I get that most people who use it are hobbyists, but if you start a project you want to take seriously, you need to think carefully about how you store and manage assets.

#4

Sure folders are helpful for organizing things. I certainly keep separate project folders, simply because it makes archiving and backing-up projects simple. It isn’t any more complicated than how I would layout directories for word processing documents or anything. I do always try to name the top level blend file something like “0_Main”, so that when I come back to a project, I know where to start looking.

Asset management is something that might vary wildly based on the use-case, and, your right, the length of involvement with a project. Tidily sorted and named groups kept off in their own file has gotten me through a couple of fairly hairy projects, thus far. Blender’s file manager does improve in it’s latest incarnation, particularly with images and textures.

This seems something well suited for scripting. There are scripts targeted at this need, but I can’t say that I’ve tried them.