Hi,
I’ve tested a bit Library override to replace proxys, it’s quite promising !
I’m a long time blender user working mainly on animation projects and Library Override will solve many corner case that I’ve seen through various projects.
For now I’ve got 2 concerns, I understand that it’s still an ongoing project, but it may be a good time to talk about them…
1/ Overriding a instanced collection link all objects of the collection in the scene.
In some cases this can be what you need, but in most projects I’ve worked on the old behavior was simpler.
If you make a proxy of a rig, you get only the rig out of the instanced collection. This make layout and animation files way cleaner, with fewer objects to manage.
One the pipeline side of things, if I want to get the casting of a shot it was just a matter of getting linked instanced collections.
It was also simpler to get rid of some element, were you just have the instance and the rig to delete.
A character can be made of 20 objects, a set made of 100, it was simpler to manage them as two objects rather than 120. Even if now it’s just a matter of selecting a collection in the outliner.
Maybe both workflow can be supported , where you can override the whole instance (like now) or only override one object. And if you want to change something on another object (ex : the face of a character) you then extract it from the dupli-collection, mostly in the rendering stage.
Anyway, it’s not a big deal and we can adapt to a new workflow, but old one look more simple and convenient to me.
2/ How it’s planned to do some variant switching ?
With proxys there was a little hack that was quite convenient. I used to do a lowpoly version of my characters, set or props. They were using the same armature as the original.
In a shot I could replace a character by it’s lowpoly version when needed by just selecting the empty that is duplicating character’s collection and set it to duplicate the lowpoly collection instead of the original.
All this was scripted, so for animators they just add to select a character rig or a set and run an operator.
At rendertime this was automatically set back to original dupli-collection.
I’ve used that extensively and I’ve heard of similar workflow used on productions like Sintel, Tears Of Steel and NextGen to list a few.
Is this something taken into account and how this is supposed to work ?
I hope all this is clear to understand, I can provide some examples or images of all this if needed.
Thanks you for taking the time to read all this !
Cheers,
Paul