Organization - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 26

Absolute : Absolute assets are ones that are not contained in the BLEND fi le
itself, but that Blender references by way of an absolute disk path. For example,
an absolute path is one that contains the entire drive and directory structure,
including the fi lename of the asset. If you are using a Microsoft® Windows®-
based computer and you have a texture image fi le in your My Pictures folder,
the absolute disk path would look something like this:

●

C:\Document and Settings\User\My Documents\My Pictures\
texture.png
As you will learn later, assets from one BLEND fi le on disk can be linked to
another, just as a texture or sound fi le.
● Relative : Relative assets are the same as absolute assets except that the disk
reference is a little more complex. Instead of referring to an asset by an
absolute disk path, relative creates a path based on how to get to the refer-
enced fi le from the active BLEND fi le. In Figure 3.1, you see a directory
structure with a BLEND fi le called “cliff.blend” fi nding a path to a texture
image fi le. There is a standard code for writing relative paths: a move to the
left is represented by two periods (“..”), while a move to the right is shown with a forward slash and a
directory name (“/dir”). In Figure 3.1, the relative path of the texture image from the BLEND fi le is:

Figure 3.1 A relative path from
the BLEND fi le to the texture
image

../../textures/rock/granite.png
because you have to go two steps to the left then right through both the “textures” and “rock” directories.

Almost all of the assets in your project will be created in individual fi les, which will be brought together by
relative linking. It's not important that you know how to do this yet, or that you know the specifi cs of path
construction, but it is important to understand the value of organizing things properly from the beginning.
If you were going to model, texture, and animate the entire production in a single BLEND fi le, it would not
only be huge—due to production issues, it may turn out to be impossible. For that reason, using local assets
will not work. To streamline production and render times on anything but the simplest of projects, you will
have many scene fi les, and they will need a way to effi ciently reference the same set of assets.
Using absolute disk paths, which is Blender's default, will work if you plan to never move the project from
you own computer's hard drive. However, if there is a possibility that you may want to work on the project in
more than one location, or that you may someday archive the production fi les to disk and want to resurrect
them in the future, you must use relative paths. Throughout the rest of this topic, you will be reminded to
use relative paths when you work with your assets. Relative paths make your project much more fl exible and
less likely to suffer a failure at some point in the production's future.

A Suggested Organizational Structure

Figure 3.2 shows a good way to organize your work.
● Export : You will probably want to send out test renders to friends or post animation clips and other
in-production materials on the Internet or your local network. Having an export folder is a good idea so
you will always know where to look when you need to send an asset out.