[Bf-committers] Proposed change for (not) rendering with missing links

[Ton Roosendaal]

Hi,

Let's be clear; options, warnings, and especially YES-NO requesters are all signs of lazy and weak design. 

The best way to solve this is to prevent this from happening. I know Daniel's cause, and it's just because a path was absolute, and not relative. Either a bug or a user error.

Solution: make the fact user works on a project with relative paths much more visible and in control. The project path (from where relativeness works) has to be explicit somehow. And especially - if user decides to use a file outside the project domain - it can just refuse that, throw big warnings, move it inside the domain, or pack it even.

Secondary: make a tool (operator) that checks for paths to be proper relative. That tool can be used at will (user), or a scripter can use it configure Blender to make it automatic. That then can be sort-of doing what's being proposed below, but it's only a debugging tool.

The work we plan for Gooseberry's asset/project system is all about this. Sanitize how data is being referenced, re-used, shared, linked, stored, versioned, copied, and so on. There's the real job.

-Ton-

--------------------------------------------------------
Ton Roosendaal  -  ton at blender.org   -   www.blender.org
Chairman Blender Foundation - Producer Blender Institute
Entrepotdok 57A  -  1018AD Amsterdam  -  The Netherlands



On 1 Mar, 2014, at 2:52, patrick boelens wrote:

> The only problem I see with this solution is when you actually know you're missing resources (i.e.: third-party textures), but want to render regardless.
> 
> I think for headless mode this would probably be less of an issue, especially considering who uses that and in which situations.
> 
> Perhaps for GUI-Blender we could show a confirmation screen, operator-style?
> 
> "You are about to render with missing resources (see render_errors.txt). Would you like to continue?" -> [Yes | No].
> 
> The second thing I'd like to address is: How do we make it clear to the user which resources are missing? Could a linked in .blend not be found, or is it a texture's image? Again, for headless mode it could probably just be printed to the console, so no issues there. But for regular use, perhaps a textblock could be created? This would give room to provide all the needed info. For instance:
> 
> Missing Mesh Data "Circle.042" from "./Costumes.blend"
> Objects affected: Cloak
> 
> Missing ../../textures/eyes.png in texture "Eyes.002"
> Materials affected: Face1, Face2
> Objects affected: Elf_F, Elf_M, Elf_M.001
> 
> Missing ../../textures/mouth.png in texture "Face"
> Materials affected: Face1, Face2
> Objects affected: Elf_F, Elf_M, Elf_M.001
> 
> Just thinking out loud here. =)
> 
> Cheers,
> Patrick
> 
>> Date: Fri, 28 Feb 2014 21:29:48 -0300
>> From: venomgfx at gmail.com
>> To: bf-committers at blender.org
>> Subject: Re: [Bf-committers] Proposed change for (not) rendering with	missing links
>> 
>> +1
>> 
>> Rendering with missing textures is never desired. An option (by default) to
>> have it stop the render immediately would save plenty of render time. This
>> option could be turned off in the user pref if desired.
>> On Feb 28, 2014 8:57 PM, "Daniel Salazar - patazstudio.com" <
>> zanqdo at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>>> Hi there, recently we lost about 24 hours of rendering time because a
>>> texture was missing in some computer. And we can't rely on the famous
>>> purple color to notice this errors, in this case it was a subtle hair
>>> length texture or it could be another type of data like linking from
>>> other blends.
>>> 
>>> I want to propose we change the renderer behavior to refuse rendering
>>> if there's a missing link. At the very least this should be
>>> implemented by default in background mode, with an optional parameter
>>> to ignore missing textures.
>>> 
>>> kind regards,
>>> 
>>> Daniel Salazar
>>> patazstudio.com
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bf-committers mailing list
>>> Bf-committers at blender.org
>>> http://lists.blender.org/mailman/listinfo/bf-committers
>>> 
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