Texture Packing
A lot of beginners don't realize that moving referenced textures can lead to all kinds of issues. A good solution would be to enable Texture packing by default. That way if textures are moved new users won't get surprised when their scene turns hot pink on them. In addition, we could still keep the reference to the file so if the file moves you can ask the user to relink it to the new location as well as a timestamp check so the user can update the packed textures if the files have been updated. It would be a big quality of life thing.
3 Comments
So the solution to new users being unaware that moving data around breaks links is to stuff up the .blend file so that every non-new user will waste time diabling that feature and new users whill have issues with stupidly huge file size and increased I/O times for no apparent reasons?
The asset browser defaulting to append caused me to accidentally create a 6 gigabyte file that was impossible for my computer to save.
A lot of beginners don't even fully comprehend what a file or a path to a file is.
Exactly. IMHO the solution for beginners is to learn. Link management is a basic thing that you have to deal with all the time in ANY software that deals with calling external files.
Plus I can't think of any situation where it's better to just pack stuff in by default. I personally explicitely don't want any form of packing unless really necessarry, like sharing .blends on the internet (and even then I often prefer a proper folder in a zip file).