First big thanks to all the developers for this awesome project, Blender is such a joy to work with.
With concept work, we have to render a lot of pictures to talk design, and let the lead paint over his ideas.
While saving an image or .blend-file it is shown red if the name already exists, and the “+” button has to be pressed to count one up.
I would love to see an save option that automatically count one up if hitting save. Basically an option to always count “1” up while hitting the save key, like a “save + 1” checkbox in the Preferences under Save & Load
Working a lot with design versions of Objects, and rendering out 200+ viewport preview images a day, this would be a great little help. Also Animators would not need to worry overwriting images while rendering animations, if they name stuff correctly, like “abc_0001”
I absolutely agree! And I also think that it’s a bad idea to train people to use Ctrl-S as the same shortcut for the incremental pie menu save:
Users should be able to set incremental save to a secondary button combo and they should be able to find it without digging through addons. I also only found it entirely by chance the first time.
I agree that an addon should not be necessary, for production this is a basic need and great to find its way into Blender core by a developer that can find some time for it.
What Do you think about the idea to set a checkbox “save incremental” in the Preferences, so the shortcut Ctrl S would save incremental automatically.
Blender does something of “incrementaling-ish” (by creating this .blend1 and .blend2, … files), so if instead incremental save (like myProject - 0001, myProject - 0002, …) would be activated by default, but could be turned of for people who like it organized the old way (.blend1, …) they could fall back on that while others would have a more familiar organization of increments.
My toughs are, giving an extra “Save incremental” option in the “File” menu just to save incremental is maybe a bit much, because:
turning it into the preferred mode once is enough for most people
Especially new users don’t know what incremental save means often and may get confused unnecessarily if the option could be turned on by default or can be checked at will anyway.
Your Mock up somehow got me thinking, what if the following options for incremental save would exist, that writes out the date and time in front or at the end of the filename like:
myProject 2021_07_20 - 11-20-59.blend
or:
2021_07_20 - 11-20-59 myProject .blend
The second way could be helpful if at different design stages the Project name changes, everything would automatically be sorted chronologically. like:
This would make it easy to jump back to a stage the design or animation was better, because often we remember the time the animation was good, like
“oh yesterday afternoon I had something on the right track, but than I started to overthink after Stanleys feedback, and messt it up, let me jump back and start over from that point”
Ctrl-S should always be reserved for regular file saving. This is a standard in every software and would be confusing to change as people might not even realize that they are saving incrementally by muscle memory.
Ctrl-Alt-S has been used as an alternative to save incrementally in several other software, from my experience but setting the shortcut to an individual liking isn’t the difficult part in this instance. We need it as an actual feature first.
Putting it into the file menu is not much at all. It is a separate feature that may need to be accessed quickly and should be treated as such. It also shouldn’t be too difficult to find out what save incremental means for a new user. Not a reason not to have it there. Ofuscating and deviating from known standards will alienate much more users than learning what a feature is once, IMO.
I kind of like the idea with the .blend1, .blend2. etc… files, though. Also agreed that it should be an option or alternative that could produce an auto cleanup, when you don’t need 50 versions but only the last, say, 10 or so.
