When you set custom paths for things like fonts, textures, etc, Blender will automatically start browsing at those locations when you want to load a font or texture or whatever file. But Blender seems to ignore the render output folder altogether, and I can’t figure out why.
When I render a single image and Save As, it opens in my home directory. When I render an animation, it looks at the scenes output directory, which makes sense. If I clear the output directory, it simply renders to my home directory. There is no situation I can create where Blender uses the render_output_directory value in my Preferences and I can’t figure out why.
Can someone help me understand what this setting is actually for?
Get a render manager, and forget about it…
All these separate file paths inside the app make no sense whatsoever, and are confusing as hell.
Even the render cache path often doesn’t work, as it seems to be saved per scene sometimes.
We need a proper batch render system in Blender. Even Maya 2009 has a more sophisticated system for getting your renders out. Yes… 2009!!!
With the promise to look into custom application templates, I hope all this will be addressed as well, so we can also properly swap file path settings on the fly. Now it doesn’t really work either.
Ironically, this is kind of what I’m trying to do. I’m working on a little add-on that brings Maya Project-like functionality to Blender so I can integrate the functionality into some other pipeline add-ons I’ve written for work. Ideally it will help keep projects self-contained better and save me clicking through my computer file hierarchy every time.
I considered this as well, but no matter how many times I create a new scene, restart Blender, or save a scene to a new location the functionality is still seemingly broken.
Interested in what you’re trying to do.
There are some project and render manager addons out there, but not quite there what you would like to see. Blender is quite the odd duck in how it deals with projects and files.
It turns out I was seriously misunderstanding what this path is used for. When you create a new scene within a Blender file it will copy the render output path from the Preferences to the Properties output panel. That’s it. It has no effect on the default Scene you get when you open Blender.
