[Bf-committers] Environment Variables for scripts and plugins

[Roger Wickes]

+1
Until we get the notion of a project and hooks into some sort of Digital Asset Management system. I just ran into this on a job I had. I had both development and production of a model on my PC. I don't want to mix the blend files for dev in with the production files, so I use different directories, and each with their own textures and actions subfolders. Even though we use relative pathing, the issue is that I have to keep all subdirectories coordinated. Just like // means "current folder where blend file is", a moral equivalent ($BLENDER_PROJECT/ perhaps?) would point to 'current project folder', because, well, hopefully projects usually make money :) $ would trigger the parser to look for a keyword until / (or \) which would be substituted for the environment variable of the same name.


___ Why a "BLENDER_PROJECT" env? __
It's imporant that the application can be aware of which 'shot' it's
working on. If the variable for the project is:
"/bdsone/durian/000_dev/000_010_shaders/3d"
It will look under the '3d' folder for 'scenes' 'textures' 'models'
etc. So you can have relative paths in your scene. This way you can
move the hole '3d' folder and the project will still be valid.
If you use a application launcher, when the project environment is set
the user will always come to the right place at once when they try and
open a file. If they press CTRL-O the will be redirected to
'3d/scenes' directly.
This is something that saves a lot of time when you have a bigger
studio and lots or projects going on. Trying to find scenes is a time
killer.

The Blender file format could be a bit of a problem for this one, but
I think that one has a lot of good things in it and I think these
things could work in conjunction with each other. But at the same time
(as a TD) I don't like at all when things are baked into one big file.

I can speak for hours about this, but this is quite a lot of text and
I think we can take it from here. What do you guys think? Should I
expand it more about how the folder structure for a big pipeline is?


-- 
[ protector of penguins - abuser of pixels ]
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