Hi all,
I want to do a short movie in Blender, and I would like to know what is the best stragegy to organize the movie files.
Is it better to have separate blend files for each character, object and for each scene create a new blend file and import all necessary objects?
Or have one big blend file with all objects and scene’s inside?
Cheers
My projects, I use one BIG-ass Blend file, sometimes I’ll have a few "side file"s made in Blender. Scenes that don’t match the Main Blend file.
One Blend file per drastic scene. Import the characters. Like inside of a house as ONE blende file, and the OUTSIDE scene could be another.
In my anmation. I have seperate scenes. I also have have some duplicate characters that are semi-boned for les complicated scenes.
I use a story board. I have pre-recorded lipsync sound, then do lipsync in Blender.
Actually I do all scenes seperately, just like a real movie would be produced. Some senece are “recorded” twice, but 2 different camera angles.
Once I have all of the pieces, then I edit them together, synchronise the voice track, add sound FX, visual FX (like title and lettering) and music.
So Basically, do it like a regular movie, but use Blender.
I use a new .blend for practically every different shot, because I don’t like to risk accidently deleteting someting I may need to redo or change later. Not very efficient though, and takes up a lot of disk space.
Spin’s method is better. I try and do it that way but usually fail. It’s a good idea to split up .blends into individual scenes as otherwise you may end up with a HUGE file. I have one unavoidably 118mb in size. Not fun to work with - nasty hard disc noises, very sluggish computer, even with only empty layers active. Doesn’t slow down render times, just makes working with it harder. So smaller files are more efficient.
However it is generally far easier to model each scene seperately rather than model it object by object in new files. But be sensible about it. Appending EVERY object into a scene from seperate files would get very annoying very quickly, but I keep a copy of the main object (or character) in a seperate file, completely on its own, to make importing it easy later.
Of course it’s all subject to what the project is. If the whole thing takes place in one or two locations just with different camera shots it’s probably better to have just one or two different .blends with different cameras.