When you work on multiple assets that might share textures, do you save them all in the same scene/project file, or have separate projects for each one?
Let’s say you are working on some game assets, like a small medieval farm town. I was using Blender at the time.
I’m using the same textures and other stuff for various models. At first, I create a project that had all of the shared models and textures. That way, I could keep some consistency. A brick, brick wall, brick steps, brick well…all uses some part of the same brick texture. This seemed like a good approach to working with shared textures and such, among similar meshes.
My normal workflow is create the meshes, create materials, assign materials and textures, uv unwrap, and then bake the results into a texture atlas for that model.
But, this seemed to turn into a huge mess. Stability went downhill fast, blender was constantly crashing. I couldn’t get baking to actually bake anything at times, it would just stop working. I would have to save often, and tell it to save 2 or 3 times in a row. Sometimes I would save, and just to see if it did, I would close blender and reopen it…nope, it didn’t save at all. I lost a lot of time this way.
Instead, I said screw it. I just created a separate scene for each asset, instead of one scene containing shared assets. It’s more work down the road imo, but a simpler workflow. When I did this…things worked better, baking and texturing worked better. But it’s more work to track and organize shared assets.
Any thoughts on this? I’m thinking it’s about time for me to just upgrade to a commercial package, like 3dx max, but if it has the same stability and organizational issues, I don’t want to bother.