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I want to make my own folder of grouped objects where I store my assets. I then want to be able to drag and drop it into any blender file so i can use group instance to access that folder and import any model i want. I know there are simpler ways to do this, but i wanted an entire library similar to the extra objects plugin. The only problem is I cannot access the information inside the .blend file. If i could access those files without the need to open blender, i could transfer data between blender files easily. Is there a way to do this?

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  • $\begingroup$ what OS are you using? if you are using windows try 7-zip file manager.7-zip.org $\endgroup$
    – triplex
    May 23, 2019 at 22:31

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You can't.

blender files use a custom binary format for a lot of stuff, so you really need to open blender to modify them safely.

There is a bit more information here: How would you go about reading a .blend file? I mean all of a .blend file, not just the .obj information

The best way to achieve similar functionality would be to do it as an addon within blender, so blender can handle file operations.

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  • $\begingroup$ Won't it be possible by heavily coding? Just curious, since he actually starts a blender instance and want to open a list of .blend file while doing something complicated. $\endgroup$
    – HikariTW
    May 24, 2019 at 1:24
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    $\begingroup$ @Hikariztw In theory yes, you could write your own software to do this (the question I linked actually has some info on this), but the amount of effort required is pretty high. You aren't relying on a stable public api, so you would often have to adapt between versions on blender (blender actually does this internally too), particularly as the encoding is also vary closely tied to blender's internal structures. I believe this is one of the main reasons they didn't leave the code to read old BI materials in 2.8 as it would have required keeping too much BI code around. $\endgroup$
    – Sazerac
    May 24, 2019 at 1:36
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What you are describing sounds like appending an object from a Blender file.

Make a master blender file containing the objects you want (that you can bring in with a copy/paste) and then append (ShiftF1) specific instances onto a new blend file from there.

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  • $\begingroup$ it kind of does provide an answer, likely they only answer that isn't "you can't"... $\endgroup$
    – MostHost LA
    May 24, 2019 at 7:41

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