Video Description

Set Building typically starts with linking in available assets from various blend files, instancing those into the scene, and positioning them nicely so that they can be picked up and placed. This is not a fun task, so perfect to automate with some scripting! In this episode of Scripting for Artists Sybren explains how to link data from different blend files, how to instance collections in the scene, and even covers the parsing of JSON files to separate the project-specific information from your add-on.

Links from the video:

• Source code of the final asset
• The Settlers project

Contents:

• The Settlers project: 00:35
• Manually going through the process: 01:30
• Linking data with Python: 02:58
• First step of linking: 05:48
• Instancing collections into the scene: 08:38
• Creating a collection if it doesn't exist yet: 10:40
• Lining up the assets: 12:33
• From snippet of code to add-on with functions: 13:22
• Reading project-specifics from a JSON file: 17:27
• Everything is working: 23:48
• Cater for future changes: 24:08