I’m just wondering how other people handle this.
You start with one PC, use it for blendering for a while on location A. After a while another PC comes in play perhaps on location B. Or someone joins your team perhaps also with multiple PC’s like me.
And if your not always work on PC A, but sometimes at PC B, then after a while textures start to be missing when sharing projects. And given more time, you’re not even dare to reorganize your textures since you could for example move all head textures, or stone texture to a folder like structure, but then it would cause havoc on exsiting projects.
I dont like the idea of not beeing able to reorganize this after some time.
Chances are high that if you started with a texture directory like:
exture\projectX
Later improving it to something like
exture\Nature\
it might later becomme
exture\Nature\Stone
later again
exture\Nature\Stone\Marble
or even…
exture\Nature\Stone\Marble\Tilerepeat
I think one would like to be flexible, but not having broken blend files (and including images isnt handy either).
I’m wondering how to deal with it, as currently overhere its starting too look like spagheti my structure, with to many duplicates.
I’ve had the same issue even on my sum what limited skills.
I created a simple folder structure for library files and associated textures. So far I am not using many textures and relying mostly on procedural stuff.
However some things do not lend themselves to procedural textures. Like for instance creating the veins (for lack of a better word) in leaves and flowers. In this case I create a texture and paint what I want on it. I keep the size small and just pack the png into the blend.
This does make the blend file larger but has the benefit once I append it to a working project that the image is included even if I move the source file.
I know that is not the best solution for many other things so a tool that would simplify finding and reconnecting linked assets would be a great help.
I know that the Amaranth tools will help to identify the missing images. Adding the function of being able to step through them and locate the folder they have moved to would be pretty helpful.
Having similar issues here, I’d like to have a reference editor where I could replace broken links by pointing to the right file or right folder. I’m still a noob at blender and I haven’t found an easy way to replace a missing datablock?
This is why I pack all my textures before closing a file, which is very very space heavy, so it’s not the best solution, but your textures never get messed with, and you can save them out to another folder from the blend.
Each project must have his own texture folder , inside the project folder.
If you share your project, or work with other people you must synchronize all the files, with dropbox for instance, with everybody.
In the mean time, you can have your own repository where you store all your textures, for reusing them later. But I don’t think it’s a good idea to use them directly in your projects, just copy/paste them to the texture folder of your project. That make duplicates, but it’s more safe like this.
Well thats in the direction, but not dropbox, i’ll gona use Torrentshare for it (its free too, but no size limits, its peer to peer protocol).
That way i can easily sinc inbetween every blender project, and even sync a general texture folder between multiple PC’s.
Hmm
So a general texture folder (which i can restructure whenever i want, it will not be project related).
then if i need a texture file copy it to my torrentshare\Blender\projectX folder
where i then can share and sync per prj with every other person or PC that i like.
Hmm 2
This is also handy for movie rendering, having identical replicas of files,
Like sozap said it’s good to keep them near your .blend . To do this for your current projects you can use “Find missing files” (not sure if it works over networks) then “Pack all into .blend” then “Unpack all into files”. Be sure to mark “Automatically pack into .blend” and unpack when your .blend’s get heavy.
Hum, if you’re talking about bittorent sync, I’ve tested it and that work well…
I’ve run in a few minor issues :
1/ you must have a least one computer always turned on, that act as a server, or you may not be in sync with other people if you don’t work at the same time.
2/ sometime you can have problems with file deletion, if someone isn"t connected at that time, his btsync may re-upload it instead of deleted it locally.
3/ also with file deletion, if you have two computers (A and B) A delete a file (like a render) and B tries to generate it again, chances are that this file will be automatically removed, unless it’s done on the A computer . (I guess if that’s done with a time delay it will be ok )
But depending on the case it can work pretty well tho…
All these problems doesn’t occurs with dropbox, another solution is to use SeaFile, that is a kind of opensourced dropbox, where you set yourself your own server. That is IMO the best file-syncing solution …
