How to link Blender scenes, data blocks and library overrides (2020)

as your 3d projects and animations grow bigger you're gonna end up with many different models materials and other assets you're gonna end up needing to reuse if you just copy these things you're gonna with really large files as well as making it really difficult on yourself to tweak things down the line especially if you're working with other animators on your team I'm Zack Hickson and today we're gonna be going over scenes datablocks library overrides and how to link them all together a lot of you have probably noticed this drop-down at the top of the screen called scenes and maybe even accidentally hit it once or twice but never really used it for anything well let me tell you you're really missing out scenes are great they allow you to create multiple independent 3d scenes all within the same file so you can organize all your different shots in one place since they're all in one file you can easily link materials and objects from one scene into another allowing you to reuse a bunch of stuff materials from other scenes can be selected just like normal by using the material drop-down if you want to send an object from one scene to another you can hit ctrl L and select the scene you want this will send a link to that object to the other scene in case you wanted to really tweak every detail of your scenes you can also like mesh data itself from other scenes as well if you're a compositing fan you're gonna love this one as you can even slap together multiple scenes in the compositor just by changing which scene is selected in the render layer node each scene can have completely different settings and render passes so you want a shot where the foreground is rendered in cycles and the background and evey BAM you got it but what if you want to use something across multiple projects like a model or a material well don't worry I got you covered you could export everything as an obj or something but what are we cavemen thankfully we're in the future we have running water electricity canned meat and two buttons in the file menu that allow us do wondrous things the first one the append button is pretty cool and works basically like your normal import where you can import anything from models and materials to entire scenes and collections from another blend file if it exists in a blender file we can append it this is good if you want to bring something into your file and then heavily modify it as you're creating a brand new copy of the thing in your scene this does have the downside though of making your files bigger so use it when appropriate then we got this cool link feature by linking we're creating a dynamic link between the original library blend file and our current blend file meaning if we update something in the original it'll up all the files we linked the asset in now I know what you're probably thinking Zack that's pretty cool but why can't I move anything well when you link something everything including the position properties are linked as well sometimes this is what you want like if you're linking background scenery and other things that don't really have to move that way when you update the position of things in the original scene it updates and all the other scenes at the same time sometimes however we do want to change things while still keeping it linked and that's where library overrides come in you can override an object by right-clicking it in the outliner and selecting add library override and you'll see we can now move it around and animate it but if we change the original the linked object is still updated we can even override specific parts of an object like just the mesh data currently this is a pretty new feature so not everything can be overriding but more override options are always being added in every update in two-point-nine for example support is supposed to be coming for overriding materials modifiers and constraints if you want to manage the data you have linked into your blend file you can go up to the outliner and switch it from view layer to blend file and you will see all your link data displayed at the bottom of the list from here you can also delete it by right-clicking and selecting delete or relocate the linked files if something got moved or renamed I hope now you feel a little bit more comfortable using scenes and linking data as well seeing some ways you can use this in your own project I'm Zach Hicks I'm with CGT cookie and I'll see you next time you

Channel: CG Cookie

Views: 28,115

Rating: 4.9530025 out of 5

Keywords: blender, tutorial, blender tutorial, cg cookie, blender 2.8, blender how to, data blocks, blender library, library override, blneder data block, blender file management

Id: r7G13NPvXuc

Length: 3min 58sec (238 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020