Live Reloading & Relocating Of Libraries

A new experimental feature (use at your own risk!) will allow you to update linked library assets on the fly - imagine collaborating in a team and seeing assets update in your scene while your team mates save their work? Sounds very useful!

mont29 writes:

Live Reloading & Relocating Of Libraries

A new experimental feature (use at your own risk!)

So, finally got something that seems to be kind of working in id-remap branch (see also the associated design task), and hence made some test builds available.

That said, let’s see a bit what id-remap is about. It’s a spin-off from Asset project, which requires ability to hot-reload libraries in Blender. This lead to hot-remapping of ID datablocks inside Blender, that is, the ability to totally replace all references to a given datablock (e.g. a material) by another one of the same type (and expected to be compatible!).

In theory this was rather simple, we already had tools to loop over ID usages in our code, but to use them in that case we need a totally valid and consistent handling of referencing and dereferencing IDs. I won’t go into dirty details here, but our master branch was far from that state. Some issues were fixed directly in master, but most implied some more involved changes that will likely rather end up in the 2.8 project.