Pack to .blend the not saved images when file saved. (renders, texture paintings)
if you do for example texture painting, it would be cool to pack the new images to .blend even when they are not real images located somewhere on the computer. Now if you paint something in UV/image editor and save file: nothing will be packed and your painting job will be lost. That could happen automatically to the newly created images/renders when you save the file.
4 Comments
This feature sounds like it's a bit of kludgy work-around for the base problem that images created in Blender aren't automatically packed. If images were automatically packed, this feature wouldn't be necessary, would it?
@Jason van Gumster: But should they be every time packed without question?
Other think that is being used in InDesign is the "pack files". When you click that, the program creates a file system where all the images etc files used in the document are packed in their own folders. In Blenders case, it would create a folder named with the Blender file.
Then you would have there a folder with names: "textures", "environments" and "links"(if your project is made with linked objects) Or something like that. Now you could easily zip all of that and send somewhere. I've not ever been a huge fan of the Blender files where all the textures are being packed to the same file, but I've used it because I don't know a better method.
@Artturi Mäntysaari: That's more like "unpacking" in Blender's way of working... or at least, bundling unpacked files into a single location.
It's not overly hard to do. I've written a couple add-ons over the years that have done that kind of bundling for sending files to renderfarms or getting more granular version control.
* But *, that's different from the feature mentioned in this proposal. I think that for images generated in Blender (like geometry generated in Blender), it makes perfect sense to pack that data into the .blend file by default. A user can always unpack that image to disk whenever desired.
@Jason van Gumster: Okay. Maybe that other thing would be then "collect files". But anyways, I believe you. I will change the proposal.