How do you make sets? I mean as in how do you organize them? Do you make an entire living room and save it as a Blender project or do you make a separate project for each piece of furniture?
I'm working in Maya, so it might be slightly different, but Blender is so advanced these days that I'm sure it probably still applies.
I use a series of referenced files (blender may call it something else, but they're files that load along with other files so that a dozen files can use the same grass field without having to save the grass a dozen times). So I build a base environment with lights and ground, trees, grass, whatever you see through the window. save that, then move on to deciding what props are in the room and save that as a separate file (I have a lot of props at this point so I tend to reuse them with other textures). Then, I import those files as a reference for the room I'm building.
Once everything is there, I'll correct textures (any changed made to a referenced object are unique, so they don't transfer to other files sharing the reference), tweak lights, cameras, add effects if there are any (flames, smoke, fog, etc). If it's just a background, then that's the end. If there are characters in the scene, then I import them as well (sometimes I need to make an entirely new file and reference the previous completed file).
Maya's pretty good with the referencing of referenced files... Other than dynamic things like hair. That does tend to get messed up as the layers of references gets deeper.
Anyway, yeah, until I started doing it this way, my save files were gigantic and loading complex environments was hellish. Now, I have a few large base files, but my working scene files are pretty reasonably sized.
