Blender Tutorial: Actually Using Library Overrides!

In this video I take a look at a practical example for using library overrides in Blender 3.2 and how they can save you a lot of duplicate work down the line.
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[@coleorloff]

Thank you Johnny. I'm always so stoked when you put out a video. They're always super clear and explain the benefits of doing it *this* way. And more so than that, you explore really interesting, more advanced process-oriented workflows that I think are thin in the Blender community. One thing I'd add that might help you (maybe...) is that you could set up a timeline with the number of images you need and animate the render visibility of each object for each frame. So when you render the animation, you knock out all 3 renders at the same time.

[@BadNormals]

This is incredibly helpful! Thanks!

[@FuzzballStudios]

I remember when I first realized I could set the viewport display colour for a material. Up till then, I’d been trying to keep all the different objects straight while they were all the same grey colour, and once I discovered the viewport display settings, my scenes could finally become as complex as I needed. It changed my life!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

I think there are some plugins out there that try to set the viewport color automatically. I need to look more into that.

[@totheknee]

Very comprehensive. Thanks!

[@ed17escobar]

Alt + clic in the properties panel = apply to all selected objects - So great thanks! And the rest of the video too

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Yeah that’s a bit of a hidden feature.

[@thehypest]

This is gold for product vis! Thank you!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Yeah, absolutely!

[@mch43856]

You're an amazing teacher thank you!

[@rubenvela1982]

Super helpful video!!

[@skjoldbroder]

so many neat tips here .. thanks!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Glad you like them!

[@QuyTran37]

Very helpful, thank you!

[@maurofuentes8076]

Excellent! Excellent! Thanks! This helped me a lot!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

That’s great to hear!

[@StrayVertex]

You're awesome, Johnny! Thank you for this! :)

[@JohnnyMatthews]

You’re welcome!

[@jasonkramer9235]

Brilliant tutorial, thanks!!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Glad it was helpful!

[@BlaBla-sf8pj]

good tuto ! thx !

[@aleksanderk5695]

Very good. Thanks!

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Your welcome!

[@ObscureHedgehog]

HOLY SMOKES! Mad tip! 🤯

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Thanks, I found it helpful for me and thought I’d share.

[@satishgoda]

Very nice tutorial. You could also make use of view layers to manage the rendering of the three assets.

[@JohnnyMatthews]

That’s a great idea!

[@satishgoda]

@@JohnnyMatthews Glad you liked it. With view layers, we can render all at once or one at a time too. I have been using this technique quite a bit.

[@maikeru2137]

Hey, I found this video looking for a confirmation for a bug in 3.2 - you can't change position, rotation etc. Can you try it? I can assign the materials like you do at about 03:30, but then I cannot move the objects without making each separate object 'Editable' in the 'ID data' context menu, which is a hassle.

[@christopher3d475]

I wish Blender had the ability to apply independent materials to instances. That would be a great future enhancement, but this is really useful info to have to achieve the same thing.

[@ZeroDean]

He literally demonstrated that you can. Make an instance, change the data setting to "object". Now change the material. Done. :)

[@Sebastianandthedeepbluemusic]

I Ma starting with overrides, and it is going ok aside from a project breaking glitch. But when it is working I found in the library overrides section that one of my charecters shows up as a collection override and non of the others do. But with that character if I add animations to the character file they show up in the project with the library overrides but the other characters I have to link new animations. They dont show the animations in the NLE automatically. Do you know offhand how to make them all collection overrides? I cant figure out what I did here

[@fvalduga]

Nice video, very good workflow. You could go one step further using view layers to hide or show the asset collections or multiple scenes to give each product a different lighting scenario. I've used to use multiple scenes in the same blend file when I need to render the same object in different finishes. So you can link the camera and collections to different scenes and adjust the lighting and world (HDRI) for each scene. This was before the introduction of the asset browser. Thanks!

[@tylerspicher3436]

Hi! Could you provide more information or resources on this workflow? I am currently evaluating Blender and this has been one of the largest hangups for me so far. I'm used to Modo, where you can have all the have several scene "states" called passes where you could just change the object's material while keeping everything else the same, just tweak a light a little bit based upon the camera angle. I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around the best way to do this in Blender and what you're stating here sounds like a similar thing. Thank you!

[@fvalduga]

@@tylerspicher3436 Hi Tyler! I'm also a Modo user, but not using much lately. I didn't find a video that covers this workflow to share with you. You can have multiple scenes in the same blender file (look at the scene pull down menu on the right-top corner). Create a new scene there. Make linked copies of the objects you want from default scene using menu Object -> Linked / Transfer Data -> Link Objects to Scene, including the camera and lights you want to move over. To have different materials (finishes) for the same object, make the object single user (Object -> Relations -> Make Single User -> Object). Assign the material to object (and not data), as shown here in this video, in each scene. Hope that helps!

[@tylerspicher3436]

@@fvalduga Thank you so much Felipe! I will give this a try.

[@fvalduga]

@@tylerspicher3436 Let me know the outcome! Cheers

[@tylerspicher3436]

@@fvalduga I just wanted to follow up and let you know that this worked well! Thanks again

[@GaryParris]

excellent

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Hope it’s useful!

[@GaryParris]

@@JohnnyMatthews although i don't have a need for it personally yet, information is always useful, even if i can point others to your tutorials for such things. and when its done well i appreciate what has been done for the sake of the community and learning :O)

[@TheTchaume]

Thanks a lot for all of this. One stupide question : at 2:47 just after bring your link object, you are able to move, scale and rotate it. Mine object are totaly locked. The only way to unfreez it, is to "object-library override-make" ?? For my needs i find pity that Blender don't let us bring thoses link object wherever we want as "append" and "append reuse" afford it.

[@robertYoutub]

Yeah, but it would be cool to have the option for object override part of the override, so you can have base materials to switch. Also if you more the one material per object it get hard on multi selection.

[@Sonario648]

I was wondering if you could do a detailed video on context override in the text editor for Blender 3.4 and up? Blender Python videos are seriously lacking.

[@rajendrameena150]

What is the use of view layers.

[@siren7837]

Hi I need some help. I'm having some trouble with this and I have a question. I'm following everything in the video but however when I try to do Library override. I don't see the one for Library override hierarchy. I'm not sure if its because of the ver of my blender or what.. could you help me out?

[@JohnnyMatthews]

Yes the library override stuff was consolidated and cleaned up into a new menu. I’m away from my computer at the moment but I’ll look for the actual name later.

[@henriklarsen8193]

The Alt-click trick was enough for me to sub! Does that work on everything?!

[@ne99234]

Hi Johnny. You always have the best niche content! I was wondering if there is a way to remove duplicates out of an asset library. Some of my parts are there as well as parts.001 copies of them but i don't know how to get rid of those. Hope you can help! Thanks.

[@ne99234]

Oh, nevermind, i found them under the orphan data :) Btw i love the new python quick tutorials. Hope to see more of this soon, it's just enough python so beginners can follow.

[@JohnnyMatthews]

I’m glad you found it! Hit me up on Twitter if you have other issues @johnnygizmo

[@MrTomyCJ]

I didn't understand what's the advantage :( For instance, instead of changing the material on the scene file, I have to open its own blend file and edit it there. The only advantage is that I don't need to have all of the data in a single file?

[@JohnnyMatthews]

In my use case, if my marketing department decides that the color of one of the units is not quite right, I don’t have to change the material the same way in 25 files. Instead I change it in one place and it fixes them all.

[@Aristocle]

It should be useful to show Scene statistics.

[@ddmorales]

Blender library logic and overrides seem way too complicated. I wish it was as simple as using it in programs like figma where you can overrride whatever and reset changes as easily.

[@PiterTraceurFA]

That text that appeared on the screen at 1:15 is not a clear explanation of a very important step. Why do so many tutorials do that? They explain everything and then skip over something that's CRUCIAL for this to work.

[@marcus_ohreallyus]

This is just too much to keep track of. When is Blender going to make a pass/take system like Cinema 4d? Don't they understand that Blender will never be truly adopted as a main DCC app by serious studios because it doesn't have a pass system and people have to do workarounds like this? Are they even aware that this shortcoming exists? I'd use Blender for professional projects if there was a take system, but I chose C4D instead.

[@i_dont_want_a_handle]

It's very sad that Blender doesn't allow library overrides for objects linked from the same file...