Libraries and Linking - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 81

Let's examine each of the pieces in the shot from Figure 6.2 to learn the different ways to link and use your assets.
Linking Assets That Do Not Animate
In an animation production, assets that do not move are called the set . Linking set assets is the simplest form
of library use and a good place to start.
Create a new BLEND fi le and save it.
WARNING
It is crucial that you save any new BLEND fi le before attempting to link assets into it. If you do not
save the fi le fi rst, the assets will be linked with the wrong settings, possibly causing problems
when you go to render months from now. We'll look at how to fi x linking problems like this later
in this chapter, but you should get in the habit of immediately saving your fi les upon creation.
Press Shift-F1 , or choose Append or Link from the main File menu, which will bring up the fi le picker/
browser as shown in Figure 6.6. Just as in Chapter 5, you navigate to the BLEND fi le that contains the assets
you would like to link and click on it as though the fi le itself were just another directory that you would like
to browse. In fact, it is just that. Blender presents the contents of the fi le in a directory-like format, showing
all of the categories of assets that are available. For now, we will only be diving into the Object “directory.”
This example, shown in Figure 6.6, will link in the model of the refrigerator from the fi le fullset.blend in the
sets directory from the Beast production.
As you can see, the list of available objects is extensive. Before selecting the fridge object, you need to
enable both the Link and Relative Paths buttons on the bottom header of the picker window. They are
Figure 6.6 The contents of the Object directory within fullset.blend