Hi guys, welcome to Version Control! In this video
we're going to talk about what Version Control is, why you would
want to do this, and how to change Blender's Save Versions,
and finally look at some of the other options that we have.
So let's hop straight over into Blender! And we've got our wedge in front
of us. Now, at the moment, I hope you have been
saving as you've been going along, but as you've been saving, Blender's
default is to just save one prior save, one version
previous. Now I know that the task coming up,
for what we're about to start doing to this periscope,
will actually be almost unrecoverable. I know we're about to
make some fundamental changes to that mesh. Now, it is
important that if you are about to try something
with your model that you don't mess it up,
that you can always get back to this deviation point that you're
about to do. So first of all, let's explore Blender's
system. So if we go up to File
and go to your User Preferences, underneath the File
tab we have Save Versions.
Now you'll notice mine is set to 0, that's because I use a different way of
keeping track of all the changes I make. However,
you may want to set that to something like 5,
maybe even a few more, not too many more. And the
reason for that is, it's difficult to
distinguish basically what the versions are. You basically get your
name.blend 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, etc. depending
on how many versions you have. They're not very descriptive
unfortunately, so you can end up being in a position where you're not quite
sure how far you have to go back, so that's a good reason not to have too
many of those. So I would recommend that perhaps you set that to
3, 4, maybe even 5 but no more than that,
because it will be a mess to try and get back to.
The other option for you... I'm just going to set that back to 0 for myself.
The other option for you is to be more descriptive. You're about
to make a change to your model, you're not sure if it's going to work or not, but you want
to try it, so you can always go to File and
Save As. Now you can see here
that's where I started, Vertices, Edges and Faces (Start File)
.blend. Well I could change that
where it says (Start File), I could now change that to saying
something like... What are we talking about? We're talking about
Version Control, so (VersionControl). I haven't
actually changed anything of my model, but when I click Save As Blender File, I now have
a new start point to go on. And if I muck
up this periscope, whatever I'm going to do to it next, then at
least I can fall back to the previous save point, rather than
worrying about what's going on or how do I get back to this model!
Obviously this periscope's a very simple model, it's only taken us a few minutes to get here.
However, if it was a much more complicated model, the last thing
you'd want to do is lose a ton of work because you didn't have a
version you could jump back to. It's all very well saving as you're going
but you do need to branch sometimes, to make sure you can always get
back when you start to experiment.
What other options are there out there? Well,
for instance, you could use Dropbox. I
use Dropbox for many things, and the great thing about
it is it keeps versions, as long as they've synced, it
keeps versions of your files for up to 30 days. So if you're working
on a project, you can extend that with their extra packages, but
if you're working within the 30 day time frame, you can always go back
in time 30 days. After that, those version changes start to be deleted,
but for most models, you may find that is enough to keep
you protected. So there are a couple of ways that you can
keep your versions, the versions of your models, under your
control and not having them wonder off on you. Take care!
See you in the next lecture!