Having worked with applications like Maya, Softimage and Houdini, I feel the basic ‘File Paths’ functionality in Blender is lacking in the project management area.
The way Blender is set up to look ‘downwards’ from the saved Blender file is very limiting when you want to use a defined folder structure for a larger project.
It would be nice to have the ability to have Blender look ‘downwards’ from a root folder, and have a default set of folders underneath for scenes, textures, cache etc…
Again, like how e.g. Maya and Houdini works.
This way you don’t have to dive into the Preferences every time you switch a project, and have set certain folders manually because of the way Blender works in that regards.
I did some searching on addons for this, but it seems there’s nothing out there.
And it makes me wonder if it’s just not possible to add this to the code, or people caved in and use this as-is.
Any tips on this, or have I been missing something really obvious in the settings somewhere
This is on the agenda for Blender developers. This kind of thing will become more essential for asset management also, where it’s important to know which project each blend file belongs to.
No offense here, but I’ve seen chatter on a internal Asset Manager since I started to look into Blender, somewhere at the beginning of 2019. And even then it was already discussed in length for quite some time.
But besides other workflow annoyances in Blender, this project management thing is the bigger one for us. And makes me wonder how a company like Tangent Studio do their movie projects.
Do you have any insides in a timeline on this? This year? Blender 3.0?
Studios use relative paths. There is no restriction that paths must only be downwards, they can also go up to the root and then down, which generally works fine with a standard folder structure.
For large productions (outside of Blender) I’ve also seen absolute paths used a lot. Where everyone is assumed to have the same root folder layout, e.g. /projects/something/... Since often such productions will use a lot of different software, and absolute paths is the one thing that works everywhere.
There is no way in Blender to set a ‘top’ folder to start in, like in the applications I mentioned.
If you can do this, all the default subfolders can be more easily accessed.
And If in a studio all applications will look at this root folder, it will be a lot easier to keep track of things.
Now I’m constantly resetting File Path settings when I switch to other projects.
As my scenes are not saved in the toplevel folder, the relative settings for the all the Data & Render folders will not work. It might be nice to have at least that to play with.
