Does Blender support any form of collaborative editing? I remember there was once a project called Verse, which allowed (or at least was supposed to) collaborative editing in Blender, even using Blender collaboratively with other applications.

Is anything along these lines (I.E. collaborative editing across a network) supported in the current version?
Blender does not provide a way for multiple uses to edit the same blend file at exactly the same time. *

However typically you can manage this by splitting your assets into separate blend files and linking from one file to another.
Blender supports recursive linking so a scene, node-groups, animation, models, materials etc can all have their own files.

Here is the documentation for the linking structure use by the open movie; Tears of Steel

Some projects do this more fine grained, where the material, armature, mesh, action are all stored in 4 separate blend files and they are combined in a 5th, and composited in a 6th. But inter-linking complexity needs to be managed or you have a mess too, where you load a blend file and 100's of megabytes are loaded because files are interlinking in situations that might be avoided.

I have found the best way to manage linking is to only go in one direction.
So for example:

Materials/Nodes -&gt; Models/Rigs/Environments -&gt; Animation -&gt; Compositing

But never link an animation into a material file for eg.

This way its predictable and you can manage what loads in a more controlled way.

Update: since 2.78 its now possible to reload libraries without re-opening the file, see: Datablock and Library Management.



*Blender used to have Verse integration, but it was removed due to not being very practical to use for real projects.