Version control history when?

sometimes i like to experiment to see what the sculpt will look like if did this or that and if dont look right then i just close without saving or make a copy. sometimes i accidentally save on the experimental result which i didnt want and if i want to ‘control z’ outta there’ well i cant because there are only 4 5 times you can go back?

Initially I would just save a new copy of the blend file. At times I noticed that is very troublesome.
• First it duplicates the MB capacity (eg: a blend file of 100 MB if saved a few times, might turn the entire project to 1 GB which is a huge waste of space).
• Then you have to open Blender in a new instance, to examine the two files side-by-side visually, and examine both versions.
• Then do an Open-Append to copy the objects into your current project, try to figure out what object names (especially if you are not into naming all objects properly)
• Finally get the object copies into your scene and further figure out what to do with them.

As you see, these are a lot of steps to take into consideration. I mean, that it works fine, but is far beyond about what I could call best-approach.


Now just to simplify things, I just create a new collection called “Backup” and make it inactive and invisible so it does not bother me at all. Once I am ready to go for a huge change, I duplicate the object and drop it into that collection. You can consider that this collection is a good way to hoard different versions of your meshes and once you are into a great need, you can just make it visible and compare the different versions side by side.

As you can see, this approach certainly simplifies a lot of problems of the first, but it does increment the size of the existing file.

P.S. Now I remembered that there is also an addon, that will allow you to save an object as a new blend file. This might be very interesting approach, as it solves two problems of (A) and (B) at the same time. I have not tried it yet but it looks very interesting.
https://github.com/Tilapiatsu/blender-export_as_blend

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Working on a duplicated version on the object seems like a good idea for sculpt experiments, if it’s not a very large model. It makes a bit easier to compare side by side.

Also, Blender 4.0 seems to be making incremental save more useful (shortcut ctrl alt s), so you might want to take a look at that and see it fits your workflow.

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You can increase your undo limit to hundreds of actions

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This is good idea as well. It had not crossed my mind to ever increase it. Mostly because I am very used to duplicating the objects and also I have a bit of fear of the undo system. :upside_down_face:
Preferences > System > Undo Steps

I see that now that there are only 32 steps, which is too low for this current generation of RAM capacity. :astonished:

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My undo steps go up to 256?

Yeah, I noticed that the upper limit is such. Perhaps developers could expand it to 1024, since now the standard RAM capacity considered to be 16GB and the real pros go fo 32 GB.

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so when someone presses control save they can title it for example ‘legsculpt.v3’ that specific mesh has been saved 3 times so and these siginificant saves are done by the user so they can just go back to that save point in time, that v.4 is already accounted for by the computer maybe throw ina image preview of the mesh too

This is correct keeping versions has many benefits.

There are two common cases, is that either you did something wrong and you need to backtrack to a previous version, or you have a dilemma about how to proceed.

Now as I think of it, when there is a very complex project with hundreds of objects, it would be impossible to make simple object-duplicates. You just save the file.

P.S. When you bring the Save-As window, you hit the numpad + and it automatically increments the file number. (Keep in mind that if you want to remain on your main blend file instead of the numbered, you will re-open the previous file and not the one you just saved).

Hum, maybe recent work on mesh data structure might make the work for a proper VCS history simpler. But it’s tricky anyway since all that data needs to be stored somewhere …

Maybe it’s more about working a bit differently , as const said making backups within the .blend is useful when you want to try something , and when you reach a particular milestone in the process you can do an incremental save of the file.

@guuch @TerraSkilll @joseph @sozap Now in Blender 4.0 release there is a new function Incremental Save feature, that is like a shortcut to SaveAs Dialog --> Numpad +

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meow that sounds fantastic but i read the fine print and it says it these unstable versions can mess up my sculpt/meshes

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I developed this addon for similar purpose. You can use as a snapshot/versioner. It does not do regular version up styoe, because I just want to do based on the time stamp.

I assigned c-s-t, every time I press that combo, it saves a copy to the place you can define in the settings. I guess the addon can be expanded to browse those revisions later but such feature is not there atm.

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128+

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