Workgroups

When working in a studio environment, its often vital to ensure that all of your team are working with the same versions, addons, scripts, and basic preferences, etc. This takes time and can often be tedious to set up on many machines. Especially on new releases or on a per project basis.

This is why Workgroups are a thing in other software. (XSI, Nuke)

"Workgroups provide a method for easily sharing customizations among a group of people working on the same project. Anybody accessing the workgroup can take advantage of any customizations installed there, including presets, commands, operators, add-ons."

• For example if 3 people are working on a project requiring AutoRig Pro, Animbox, and Deadline addons, which they do not usually use. Routing to an Asset Browser lib with the characters and poses in an obscure file path. And they need to use CPU rendering as a system setting as apposed to their usual GPU CUDA/Optix setting. They would usually manually and individually have to intall and set up most of those things. But instead they define a file path in the Blender Pref UI to a workgroup and blender automatically sets up what they need so they can immediately start working on that project. Then when they are done with the project, they could leave that workgroup and the settings would return to previous states.

A nice example of a workgroup solution was posted by a user by the name of Knekke in 2018 on a japanese wiki which I cant seem to link at the moment. (will try post in comments)

He also provided a mockup of what defining/organizing workgroups for addons might look like in the Blender UI. (Albeit the now "legacy" 2.7 UI):

Having multiple workgroups that could run concurrently with each other in order to provide good baseline customization, as well as project specific customization at least on an addon level would also be pretty handy.

Workgroups could also be helpful for deployment of Blender on multiple machines for render farms as after install those nodes could be pointed to a Workgroup to ensure that all the settings for those machines are optimal. (perhaps even with command line params)

While there are workarounds for something similar to Workgroups using Blender Cloud/ Blender ID and repository preference files, they are not ideal, and have not yet yielded the desired results. Specially when considering some users have keymaps and other settings they use on a personal level that are overriden by this method.

I don't want to bloat this post too much by providing more examples and needlessly carrying on, but I hope I have managed to get the point across. For more reference and documentation on the subject, XSI has probably the most robust set of workgroups despite the fact that its implimentation about 13 years old at this point. It could probably do with refinement but the bones are there.

I think that workgroups or some sort of similar implementation would really aid Blender as a studio efficient software, especially for smaller teams who don't really have the capacity for custom launchers and lengthy script writing per project. Given Blenders history of making cool stuff, I am sure an amazing, feature stacked, robust, and well thought out version of Workgroups can be a really helpful thing in future.

Thanks for reading. Let me know thoughts or opinions or other solutions.

Fin.