General BlendNet usage recommendations

This document contains general recommendations about how to better use BlendNet with your project structure to get the maximum output from it.

Use project dir as much as possible

v0.4

It's possible to use the external resources (linked libs are not tested and probably will work incorrectly).

v0.3

The way BlendNet task is restoring the workspace is quite simple - it creates workspace directory and placing everything in it. All the dependencies should be placed there - not like some deps will use absolute paths from somewhere or parent dirs - it's bad practice.

If you want to use some common resources with the other projects - use symlinks, binds or mounts to show BlendNet that the file is actually available from the project dir.

Use links to assets in project blend file

BlendNet is sending the resaved blend project file and the way Blender saving file makes impossible to tell that the file is the same as the previous sent one or not. So each time you press the Run Image Task button the project blend file will be sent again to the Master. And if it's huge - you will get a serious overhead in transfer and storing of it on the Master and Agents nodes.

To solve this issue just keep your main project blend file as small as possible and just link the assets you need from the other blend files or resources files. The dependencies of the main project will not be resent again if they are not changed (have the same checksum as already existing on Manager or Agents). So just move to the modular structure of your project, put assets somewhere else to make the actual project blend file as small as possible and you will save tons of time and other resources.