Welcome to relinking blend files in this video you will make a commit.
Trust me at this point there's a possible day to frustration almost inevitable if you don't make some
sort of go back point.
So whether it's a commit whether you're zipping up your data folder your current working folder.
Just make sure you've got a backup before you do anything like this because it's potentially highly
destructive.
I understand the ordeal you need to do things in if you wish to change a linked file or its data blocks.
And we'll also see what happens if you change a link.
Sir first of all moving or renaming blend files make a commit so that if something does go wrong you
can go back to its copy the files to a new location.
Even if that means they're in the same location or an entirely new folder that doesn't matter.
But what does matter is we do not remove the originals at the moment.
They must stay there rename the copied files appropriately so we've made a fundamental change.
Then obviously you can rename them.
Or in my case I am about to go through.
I just want to shorten the names and make them a bit neater.
Doing it in any other order will break links and any links broken when you save the blend file will
be lost forever which of course will result in more work reconstructing.
And as we've seen with the.
Was certainly with my Gothic church so far there are a lot of parts that are reused there are only about
eight in total that do the whole building.
Certainly the window parts and the blank wall paints.
If those links were broken I'm going to have to pour a lot more parts back into my model.
I don't want to do that.
There we've got moving or renaming data blocks.
This isn't so straightforward as a completely different method to preserving them.
Should you want to move or remain them remember.
Make a commit so you can roll back at any point.
Copy the files.
Then open up that copy and make your data block adjustments so you might want to change the mesh name
of an object or even the object name.
Or perhaps you want to change the mysterious all name that you've assigned.
Perhaps it was an appropriate but you need to make these adjustments in the copy.
Then we'll go ahead and link the new file into the scene.
Make links to the new object replacing the old one and then finally you can go ahead and delete or archive
the old blend file and that's as we will shortly see will happily remove that link from Blender any
way.
By the act of doing that on the next save.
So let's go experience all of this and hop on over into a blender.
Okay so back in blender The first thing this I'm going to do is demonstrate what happens if we do something
to an existing blend file that's linked into our scene.
So let's go ahead and go to the file system here and I'm going to do the front door because it's one
of the least use pieces so something goes wrong at least then I can sort it out.
So I've got Church front door here.
If I go ahead and delete the numbers at the end of it which is one of the things I want to do because
I think I'm going to go for a more of a standard format with these underneath except that they're going
to be two by four or two by two or four by four and a thickness a stick.
Kurtz OK again point to zull maybe even multiples or point two but as long as I know there's a standard
across the building that's undoing I shouldn't have to put in all these extra details.
Okay so now that I've renamed that if we get went ahead and re opened our church there we go the front
door has disappeared and I think it's used over here as well so that one has also disappeared and we
can have a look in the outliner itself we can see that the parts there's actually an empty there now
in the parts and that no doubt will be the church door so here we go.
Having a look in the outline of the church door is now an empty where it used to be.
Now if we go ahead and save the blend file at this point in time we will destroy that link forever we'd
have to read link the church door into the scene which is not always a bad thing but imagine having
to do that for something is repeated a couple of hundred times.
Not sure how often.
In this scene so far the blank wall piece is used but it's used an awful lot and I wouldn't fancy having
to reconstruct it all because I had made a silly mistake with moving something.
So instead of doing that's what we can do is go back.
I am just going to highlight those numbers.
Fortunately the naming convention meant I can just do that because we named our file the same as we
named the mesh data and the object data.
So now that I've renamed that fact should restore the file.
The important thing is that you don't go ahead and save.
That's easy to do.
For instance you may not notice that a wall piece.
Sorry you will notice Civil War pieces missing.
But if you've got a small let's say a candle or something in the scene and you'll look into it from
the outside and you're making some changes from the outside.
You might not notice that disappearing.
So now that we've reverted in we've changed the name back we've got the door back there so if we wanted
to move our object the first thing to do is make sure that we are using relative or absolute paths.
Now by default it's using a relative path which basically means that it's not reliant on whether or
not you're in the exact use a directory on a particular computer.
What it does mean is as long as all of the stuff is grouped in a similar way on every computer.
So in this case I have my project folder and meshes as long as and the other folders that are associated
there.
As long as that folder structure still exists on another computer it will work.
So let's go ahead and just check what we've got so when I go in link a file there or where the operator
panel usually set on the lower left hand side.
We've got relative path ticked and that will be ticked by the phone and we will also want to leave it
ticked so we will leave it teched have a click Cancel to come out of there we check that.
So the first thing that we'd need to do if we wanted to move information about or rename and rename
things what I'm going to do.
So I don't have to type too much.
Let's go to the file system and copy the blend file.
Now that we've copied the blend file we can just rename it and for speed purposes.
I'm going to call it church front door C F D.
Lower case they have case does matter it is case sensitive.
What we don't want to do is invert the break some think by not getting the case right.
So I've named it cft hopping back into blender.
I can then go to the data blocks in the outline.
Once I'm in the data blocks will need to go and find the libraries.
Now this is going to look a bit messy.
We think we've named everything and in fact we've missed something.
These libraries alas okay because they're hidden away.
But since we're here we can actually go in and name them.
Now I've gone into the section a few times so I know straight away mind.
Library 0 0 4 is the door and we can see the file path down here.
Links to the door itself now because the data blocks are in the file itself have not changed.
All we've done is moved the file position.
We can update this to the new name or even the new position if we moved it to a nother folder.
The first thing I'm going to do is actually call it front door on the library so that I know what it
is just by looking at it so if I need to come back later I know where it is and we can see here is a
relative path.
It's got the two slashes Dodderer meshes and then we've got the file name there so one of the reasons
why I wanted it shorter is sort of this area and a few other areas in blender you get I can't widen
that so it's just too long so we had it church front door and I'm just going to go back and make sure.
Oh no that wouldn't work you do have to make sure this is named perfectly so if it does mean you look
here and then you hop back and go see if they don't blend cft or blend lowercase etc..
It's in the meshes folder will have not changed anything there so that should be absolutely fine.
What we can now do is go ahead and save the blend file.
Don't make a mistake and don't make a mistake try to do double check for it you've got this right before
you click save and then go ahead and let's reopen the file again.
Then all should be okay.
If you're doing things like this for your own sake do them one at a time and commits.
In between each one so that if you do make a mistake you'd know where you've made the mistake and you
can just go back to that point.
If you got to change all of these pieces out or just move them all to a new folder and you're doing
this to keep it nice and sane for you then of course you will need to make that commute in between is
what you will want to do is do the whole lot again.
So now that we've done that the other thing is if we knew a data block.
Now that's something slightly different.
Again we need to take a copy of the file.
So let's take a copy of the C.F. the file.
In this case.
So then take a copy of that file and it's going to be called See if the two.
Really really deep and I'm going to rename the mesh data here.
Actually what I want to call it so instead of going down this route I'm going to rename the blend file
in the moments I want to call this level of detail at E Since it's a lower poly mesh it's a very basic
mesh and I want to call this then the front door.
I know it's a church because that's what I'm building.
You may call it whatever is appropriate for your particular model but French Church.
That's great.
Now say the word church I type it elodie Acres is the basic model.
Front door.
Don't need any more details than that.
I'm going to go in and update the meche data as well to reflect on the same name that at the moment
is important.
Now see if the two is not the right name at all.
So I'm going to go ahead here and go save as an I'm just going to call it front door again.
It is explicit that's an put underscoring there is explicit though it's going to be a church that I'm
working on.
I can even move it into a church folder of that was at all necessary.
So I'm going to save that and go back to my file system quickly and do a tiny bit of clearing up.
I'm going to deletes the C.F. the two that I created.
Okay so now when I go back into the scene itself the Gothic church scene I'm going to have to link that
new file in.
Meshes and front door object elodie a front door and then we could pick left higher levels of detail
if necessary so we're going to pull that in.
It's come in and we're going to make it a proxy and it's on layer 2 here which is absolutely fine.
The ground is not on the appropriate layer so that's move too and how one sets all together.
Again grounds back on.
So in order to take that object data from that newly imported object what we need to do is first select
the ones that are going to receive that data.
Which is all we don't on that corner piece.
Which of these two front doors are not doing very well selecting.
There we go.
Now I have selected those two unlive turning this other layer which Scott the last door on has selected
So the active object has to be the one giving the data and then we can go to objects and make links
and we can see the shortcut there is control and L..
And this is where we go object data.
Now nothing will have really change because they're both the same actual mesh and the knife edge is
called something different.
If we go ahead and save the file now and come out of blender completely and say let's go here now that's
named at cft SOME going to the leads and take a punt here that are done that correctly Unger the least
churched front door and c f d completely from my archive I can do it safely because I've made a commit
and then I'm going to make sure it's saved and revert.
And there we go.
It's still there.
They haven't disappeared.
Now you can use this for other things as well.
So say I wanted to replace this war piece at the very top because they're modular.
They're all the same size.
It means that I can then select the door down at the bottom go control in L and do the object data.
And when I do the object data you can see it replaces it and that is incredibly powerful allows you
to modify your project very very quickly.
And as you saw in that list there are some other things you can do as well.
So say we came up with a an awesome colour for the church itself so unethically create a new material
on this wall piece here.
Now it's going to apply to every single wall piece that that has inherited which is the rest of the
wall pieces in the model.
And let's.
That's to say we've we've made it an awesome orange and let's call it awesome orange.
It's my new favourite colour.
Awesome orange.
And I'm going to hop into materials just to make sure that's applied quite bright and say we wanted
that on all of the vaults that saqi forgetting what these things are called.
We would select the vaults first.
All of them if we wanted it on every single one.
And then and only then we would click on the donor and then we go control an L..
And select materials and there we go it's inherited those materials very very powerful and can save
an awful lot of work having to assign those individually.
Brilliant.
Okay guys I'd like you to check your naming and filing so ensure all the basic building blocks are named
appropriately.
I'm going to be using the prefix elodie underscore a for mine which means it's the lowest level of the
Tel model I'll be working with.
Make your names as concise as they need to be.
So I have personally decided that I don't need the prefix church since the whole project is going to
be about church.
If you're doing a different type of Interior maybe kitchen or something like that.
Name your project folder appropriately rather than having the individual name tag on the beginning of
file is entirely up to you.
This is one of those things that's at more of a personal taste and I've decided the numbers at the end
might just be a bit clunky So I'm going to cut those off as well.
I know that all of my building blocks for this particular scene are going to be four by four or four
by two or two by two so they are going to fit together nicely and I'm going have to stick to that standard
width four point two.
Unless it's some sorta special part in which case it's probably not going to be modular any way it's
going to be a special part.
The method for data blocks.
By the way works if you're renaming a moving the whole file too.
So if you're going to be doing both of those tasks and not just an organizational task then you will
probably be better off doing the second method but do them one at a time and remember to commit or backup
your work before you do any of this because it can be very destructive.
What I don't want you guys to do is obviously have to repeat a load of work because you made a tiny
mistake in naming something.
And this is going to be another one of those lectures where I'm going to leave you to it.
I'm going to go off and rename all of my files and I'll see you guys in the next lecture.