Original subtitles

- [Pierre] In this video,

we'll see how to append or link our character

into a new Blender scene.

At the time I'm recording this video,

the linking system is still under development.

So I will just give you the very basic

to be able to input your character in a new scene

to create whatever shots you want.

You can use two different methods.

The first one will be to append our assets.

I have a new Blender scene open.

I will get rid of everything, go to File, Append.

From there, I can search into the file folder

for the final squirrel file.

Blender files are containers,

and as soon as I will select it,

a bunch of folders will appear.

You can contender the blend file as zipped file.

You will find a hierarchy of folders

containing all the assets you have

in your original Blender file.

Wherever it's your mesh data, the scene options,

the materials, the world, et cetera.

And it also includes the collection.

So if I click my collection

and import my squirrel collection,

Blender will append the squirrel collection

including the squeal object and the armature.

And it will also append everything used by this collection

whether it's the material of our squirrel

or the widget object I've used to create the rig.

So I can select all of those objects in the collection

and in the 3D viewport, press X to delete them.

From there I can use the rig and the squirrel character,

as we will do, in the original file.

If I open the action editor now,

Blender has imported the run cycle only animation

because it was the one that was used in the file.

Since all the action were not assigned to the armature

on the origin file, they were not used

and hence not imported.

So I can go to File and Append again

and browse for the action in our squirrel file.

And I can choose whatever action I want to import.

Now I can find them in my action library

but they have no users.

So remember, if you want to keep them

while saving and closing your file,

you need to add a fake user.

So basically, appending an asset

is like copy and pasting it from another file.

Let's now have a look to linking.

In an empty Blender file,

I will go to File, Link and browse for my original file.

Go into the collection and link the collection.

I get something pretty close

to what we had when I've appended the collection.

I can see my squirrel, I can see the rig,

when I go into preview mode to material seems to work.

In the action editor,

there seems to be the animation in the library.

The main difference we can here

is that our characters seems to be attached to an empty

and it's currently an empty object.

And this empty object is currently instancing

the collection of our squirrel.

So it's not an independent copy of the collection

but currently some kind of a clone

where I can't edit in, I only have access to object mode.

And it's the same for the action.

If I unfold it,

you can see that the key frame are not exposed

and I can't modify them.

To be able to access our rig,

we need to go into the collection

and find our collection under the collection instance.

This little chain icon is here to tell us

this is a linked data.

Right click on it and under ID data,

go to add library override hierarchy.

It has created a new collection called Squirrel

with a new icon showing a chain across by an arrow.

Those are still a linked asset,

but we can now access our squirrel object

and also our squirrel armature.

So I can get rid of my squirrel instance.

The cool thing is that I can now go into pause mode

onto my armature and they can manipulate my character

as we will do in your original file.

But if I want to edit my character, I can't.

Blender will output an error message

because I can't did the data of my object

nor the data of the mesh.

We can see that the data are grayed out.

So basically, they don't belong to this Blender file

but to another Blender file.

So we can use those data, but we can't modify them.

And it's the same with the armature,

I can't go into edit mode.

And it's also the same with animation data,

we can't edit the current animation.

But since we can access our rig

we can create new animation if we want.

And the cool thing

is that we can make the current animation local

so I can import all the link an animation

we have made previously,

make it local So is that it's currently a copy

of the animation and we can modify it at will.

To make it local, just select the action

and click on the chain.

It will become a local action,

or you can simply duplicate the action

and it will create a local action

that is exactly the same as the linked one.

The big benefit of used linked assets

is that if the asset gets modified in the original file,

it will be updated in our scene.

To do so, I just need to go in your original file,

modify the color of the character for example,

or its shape, save it.

Then in the Blender file where we are using

those linked data, We can save this file for example,

and just revert it or reload it

so that it will update all the linked data.

So while, as animators,

we want to be able to create a new animation, which we can,

we may not want to mess up with the rig all with the object.

And if in the meantime,

the character artist is updating our character,

Whenever we go back to the scene to continue on animating

it will update automatically.

So using linked asset is super powerful in production.

To summarize, we have seen that when we append data

from one Blender file to another,

it creates an original copy, it's like using copy and paste.

When we link asset it will currently create an empty object

with an instance of the asset.

To be able to use those assets

we need to create a library override.

The big benefit of library override

is that we can use the data from those assets

but we can't edit them, so they are kind of protected.

And whenever the source file is getting updated

our current file will be updated too,

making it perfect for team work.

So using a linked asset library

is perfect for teamwork or large-scale projects.