Save & Pack¶

Renderset allows you to pack all data necessary for any given opened .blend into the file itself. This is very handy when sending blends to clients, to other computers or even to render farms.

The operator runs a loop to unwind all the complex dependencies, each iteration it will:

make all datablocks local
pack all external data

This is necessary because you cannot affect datablocks referenced in a linked datablock before making the container datablock local first. We do not want to get into technical details here but long story short you have to run this in a loop to unwind all the dependencies.

After the operator finishes you should get a .blend looking like this:

flowchart TB subgraph big_blend.blend scene --> object1 scene --> object2 object1 --> texture.png object1 --> object1_mesh object2 --> ... end

What about Pack Libraries?

Blender 3.0 and newer support packing linked libraries. This sometimes works but has two rather large disadvantages. The final file is larger than necessary because it will pack entire libraries, including datablocks that are not used. More importantly though it does not work for libraries linked by absolute path and those are very common in production scenes!