Global Variables (e.g. for File Names)

I have tried to flag this on various platforms/forums but I’d really like to stress again that until something akin to Houdini’s environment variables implementation is added to Blender it is unnecessarily hard to integrate with pipelines.

I had to use Blender on a project briefly earlier in the year, but manually updating the outputs every time I versioned my scene to be compatible with our asset schema grew tiresome very fast. As this was a (very) last minute addition to the project there was no time for us to engineer a workflow, but this would have taken care of itself if we could simply use tokens/variables in filepaths (or any string fields for that matter).

See:

*edit - fixed typos

7 Likes

Oh my god yes please. Versioning render outputs is terrible and error-prone. Many an EXR have been wrongly overwritten. It’s so surprising this isn’t a thing yet, I’m wondering maybe it’s already there and I just missed it ? Apart from the ### to specify frame number I can’t think of anything else.

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I feel honored that my Right-Click-Select proposal resurfaces once again. And I can totally feel your pain.

In the age of machine learning we’re already enjoying the pleasures of AI denoising and soon path guiding.
But we’re still waiting desperately for the technology of the 90s to be implemented :wink:

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Just not file path guiding, smh

1 Like