Build your own Live Links for Blender (and more)

Final source code and the PDF version of the article.

If you have ever used Quixel Bridge, Substance Painter or Unreal Engine, you would have come across their live link feature at some point. These live links make your life easier by handling the transportation of data between to applications that are incompatible out of the box. For example, the Megascans Addon for Blender allows you to export an asset from Quixel Bridge, import it into Blender and properly setup their materials all in a single click.

These experiences are enabled by building live links between these applications using their respective APIs. But how do they work? What if you have an application from which you want to send data to Blender, but there is no live link for it? How difficult is it to build one?

We will explore answers to these question in this article.