I suppose in a sense there’s no way for Sheep-It to work without doing this. My impression was, Sheep-It basically launches an instance of Blender with no UI on your computer, and I suppose that logically that Blender instance would need to have access to the project files in order to render the image. Come to think of it, I’m not 100% sure than any cloud-based render farm would be able to work without doing this. But perhaps I’m wrong?
ETA: Also, when did the forum get nested comments? Nice!
