Libraries and Linking - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 79

Although it is full of everything you need to successfully render a scene, this fi le (Figure 6.1) has very few
local assets. The characters (Figure 6.1A), including their materials and particle systems, are all linked to their
respective fi les in the /production/models/ directory. The set and almost all of the lamps (Figure 6.1B) are
linked as an entire scene to the appropriate set in
the /production/sets/ directory. The toy car that
bounces off the dog's head and the phone in the
mother's hand (Figure 6.1C) are linked to their own
fi les in the models directory. The few assets that are
local to the shot07.blend fi le are: the actual anima-
tion data for the characters and the spot lamps that
follow the characters.

If that BLEND fi le is moved out of the organized
directory structure and opened, it will not know
where to fi nd all of its linked assets, and it will
appear as it does in Figure 6.2. All that is left are
the local assets of the spot lamp, the skirt, and a
couple Empties that acted as animation stand-ins
for the phone and car.

Figure 6.2 shot07.blend opened without its library linked assets

Each “shot” fi le in the scenes directory is constructed this way, meaning that any changes made to assets in
the sets or models directories will automatically carry through when that shot's fi le is opened for work or
rendering.

In fact, each individual asset has its own master
BLEND fi le, either in the models or the sets direc-
tory. Figure 6.3 shows the fi le patheticbear.blend
from the models directory. This fi le contains the
Beast's stuffed animal toy. The fi le has mesh objects,
an armature, and a deformation lattice, all of which
are necessary to animate the toy. These objects are
all named appropriately (pathetic_arm, patheticbear,
path_eye, path_mouth, path_lat), so they are easy to
keep track of when part of a crowded scene, and
they are easy to identify when creating the asset
links. In addition to the assets that we want to link
to, the fi le also contains a camera and some lamps,
which were used for test renders while building the
model. These objects can be left in the fi le for later
testing and tweaking because they can simply be
ignored during the linking process.

Figure 6.3 The Beast's pathetic bear toy