External reference files (USD,ABC,FBX,OBJ, etc..)
Hello everyone! First day on blender 2.8 here - wo0t ! Anyone knows if there is a way to get meshes (or Lights, materials ...) referenced from a file ? Im coming from Softimage / Houdini sort of got used to this workflow, i.e changing a file to have the scene(s) updated. Just in case, here's a 'for instance':
- Modellers updates a few assets: Trees, Housing, mountains.
If external file refs are not possible at this moment, how are you guys working around this for other file formats ?
A
7 Comments
Hey, there's a paid addon for linking FBX and OBJ files gum.co/VdfWk
* @lukish14 * it have a really poor rating and as many DCC handle it natively, it would be great to have it in blender
Thanks for the link to BlenderArtist. My intention was to suggest a feature if it doesnt exist already. Living dangerously i know, lol. I thought it'd be a great feature to have the file path as a property inside the imported object.
@alexdoss: Annnd... I should've read a little bit more closely. You can definitely use a multi-file workflow in Blender by way of linked assets (be they meshes, lights, materials, world properties, rigs, etc... they just have to be datablocks). There are some workflow issues where things could be nicer, but those should hopefully come into play in Blender 2.81 and after (I'm specifically referring to static overrides for linked assets).
Of course, this only works for assets stored in .blend files. Support for linking other assets would be pretty tricky to implement because there would need to be an import/conversion process each time the main scene file is opened.
* @Jason van Gumster * that's not the same thing at all. In the case you work on multiple software, this workflow can't work. the point is to load cache file like alembic with the ability to update them externally
* @kaiz3rwork * Mesh Cache formats like Alembic, MDD, or PC2 already work that way because they're pulled in as modifiers. Other formats are far more tricky to do that with.
This kind of question is probably better addressed on the user forums over at BlenderArtists . This website is for posting proposals on features to add to and improve Blender.