Hi Juan,

The short answer is of course not! We are working on a way to automate the distribution of assets to all nodes. I completely agree that having to pack is annoying and inflexible.

Consider our position for a moment though, we are a group of three devs, working in our spare time on this project. We are trying to fund raise all the time to get us working full time. We are as frustrated by the state of our software as you might be with this particular issue, we want to work on it, but we have, for the time being, to work day jobs to pay rent and such.

Ok, enough of the sob story! To give you a better idea of the real issues at stake here, consider the following.

Keeping assets linked makes for a very flexible way to work on your project. However it comes at a cost.

Using linked assets requires each node in your network to have access to the linked/appended files at render time. To get around having to pack files, you can choose to link and append from a network storage location. This way each node will automatically be able to access the file at render time, and you'll not have to pack anything.

However, using this method you have to be aware of how much network traffic will be generated each time you render. Since each node does not have access to the linked/appended files, they will need to be transferred at some point. I am not sure if blender caches appended/ linked files for subsequent renders either.

So, if you had 10Gb of external data, and ten nodes, then you have 100GB of data to transfer across the network from your shared storage to update each node for the render. Even if blender caches this data, the first time is gonna hurt.

For example