Blender in film and TV post-production.

#1

I am now in my second week of exploring Blender’s possible use in TV and film and I am left with some pretty big concerns. My first question on this forum is to whom or where I should post my concerns? I want to first exhaust the possibility that the features I see missing (which are show stoppers) aren’t actually already there, buried, hidden, badly implemented or, far more likely, just overlooked by yours truly.

Blender seems great for doing one-offs. It doesn’t seem so great for dealing with managing large data sets. For example, I just loaded a model I purchased that has thousands of texture maps applied to it. In 3DSMax, when texture paths are no longer valid, you open a window, give Max a directory path and Max will recursively look in all the sub folders for that texture file and re-link them.

Can Blender even do something like this? I am sure you could probably do it with Python, but as soon as you are in Python, you are no longer making art for a TV or film audience. I’ve written enough code in my life to realize that this can be part of making the art, but not something as simple as this in 2011.

I’d love any and all the feedback I can get on this. Thanks!

#2

Hi, blender has some tools for that, you can find them in file->external data.

Here’s some info:
http://www.blender.org/development/release-logs/blender-246/external-filepath-tools/

Here’s a video explaining how they did asset management in the open movie Sintel:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W1HZCp_NG7o

hope it helps.

#3

Thanks so much. THe links you sent were fantastic and pointing me to where in Blender I could find what I was looking for was incredibly helpful. Thank you again.

#4

File > External Data > Find missing files.

Select the main folder and Blender should do the same as Max and load up all of the texture maps.

#5

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