Hi I love that you have done a course on this, it’s a really good topic. I didn’t know how much of Blender’s internal wor...

Question

Hi I love that you have done a course on this, it’s a really good topic. I didn’t know how much of Blender’s internal workings I was ignorant of. Two questions if that is OK: (1) I use two computers for Blender. I work on a Windows 10 laptop, and I render on a Linux server. I share Blender files between them via a Dropbox folder which is present on both machines (but obviously Windows and Linux use completely different directory structures and therefore completely different absolute paths). I have never explicitly told Blender to use relative paths, yet I have also never run into a problem with missing image textures. I save on my Windows machine, open on my Linux machine (after Dropbox has synced) and everything is as I left it. Having watched this video, I can’t work out how I’ve been getting away with it….? I’m scratching my head as to how it’s been working. (2) Also, at 4:34 in the video, you say that you are going to file, external data, and clicking “make all paths relative”, but it REALLY REALLY looks like you are in fact clicking “make all paths absolute”…?? Maybe this is just something about the frame rate of the video? But it confuses my tiny brain so I just wanted to check. Thanks for any help

Answer 1 · 2016-06-17T18:50:23Z

Jonathan Lampel replied June 17, 2016 6:50pm

Hey Lewis, good question! Sharing files over dropbox is super useful, and something I do often. In this case, I think you’re able to do it because dropbox is in the same place on both computers. For example, mine is at C: -> Users -> Jonathan -> Dropbox on both of my computers, so since my username is the same, the path to it is exactly the same as well.

Also, good catch on the video! I think while recording I hovered over “absolute” and then moved my mouse up to “relative”. But I coughed or something while moving and cut out that noise in editing and didn’t realize it made it look like I was clicking something else. Apologies for any confusion!

Answer 2 · 2016-06-17T19:42:21Z

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replied June 17, 2016 7:42pm

Hi Jonathan I thought of the same path thing but, as I say, one computer is Windows 10, and one is Linux. So on one computer the path is C:\Users\lewis\Dropbox\Blender. On the other computer, after Dropbox has synced the path is /media/lewis/Storage/Dropbox/Blender. Linux uses a completely different file system. Yet for some reason, it just works!! It's not a problem (the opposite really), but it seems like it shouldn't.... and things that work when they shouldn't bug me.