Our visualization workflow
Among the wide range of rendering software available, we often choose Blender for product and spatial design visualisation and animation. This open source software allows us to handle most of our visualisation pipeline conveniently in one interface: from texturing, uv-mapping, lighting, rigging and animating, to the final render and compositing. What we render for still-images today, we can animate tomorrow, without the need to change software and redo most of the preliminary work, at the same time keeping visual consistency and assets synchronized in case of changes.
The flip side of using a flexible, generalist software is that some of the workflows that are very streamlined in other specialized applications are not as fast or intuitive, requiring a steep learning curve and some initial setup to achieve similar outcomes, resulting in often small but annoying bottlenecks that we need to live with for every new project.
Managing linked resources
One of those bottlenecks was the lack of sophisticated tools to manage linked assets. Linking resources from different files is a great way of keeping a project organized: for most projects we keep an "asset" file, where we define every material, texture and rig of that specific asset, and multiple "scene" files where we have one (or multiple) linked copy of said asset, plus the lighting, cameras or animation setup for a particular scene. If we need to change a material of the asset, we do it once in its file, ensuring that the change is reflected across all its linked scenes. Another benefit of spreading a project across different files is the possibility to work productively in a team: one user can be focused on setting up the overall scene, while others work on single items.
By default, linked assets can be seen in the Blender interface changing the Outliner from View Layer to Blender File, where a list of paths to the linked assets is provided. From here, assets can be updated or relinked. This works fine for simpler projects, but when a scene starts to have multiple linked assets, it becomes progressively harder to make sense of which assets comes from which file in the list. Additionally, there is no direct way of opening the asset file: as we often go back and forth from the asset file to the scene file after changes, this proved to add a layer of friction to our workflow.
Thankfully, another area where Blender shines is how easy and well documented it is do extend its functionality via so called "extensions". Not only there is a vast selection of publicly available ones, but it's possible to develop addons that are tailored to our workflow using Blender's Python APIs.
So that's what we did, and here we present one of our plugins that make our rendering life easier on a daily basis.
Meet Links Manager
We created "Links Manager", a simple add-on that lives in the 3D-view sidebar, listing all the linked assets by file name. From here one can reload a specific linked file (or all of them at the same time), delete it or open the asset file directly in a new Blender session. If a link is broken, as sometimes files are moved, one can relink it. That's it: four buttons, less navigating the Blender interface and looking into the system file tree.
From one-time scripts to addons
We regularly rely on custom scripts to automate repetitive tasks, but when we notice that we're encountering the same roadblock over and over, we take the time to package those scripts as handy Blender addons to be reused across our projects. These two small tools fit closely to our specific workflow, but you might take inspiration or reuse them in yours: find here the source code for Links Manager.