Action animations disappearing!

[Jon.Topps]

I'm super frustrated right now. I spent a ton of time making some action animations for a model I have that I want to import into a game. I've idle, idle 2, walk, run, and shooting. I just finished making the shooting one, and then I noticed I don't have my idle 2 anymore. So I think I probably just messed up, so I recreate the idle 2.... then my walk animation is gone.... so I try to create a new one to remake the walk, and my shooting is gone....
Where are the stupid actions going! I've spent hours figuring out how to make it look perfect, just to have them BOP gone completely? Super frustrated. Any ideas? I'd really appreciate the help.

[Jon.Topps]

Found the problem. Here's what someone else wrote in the Blender forums. This is an absolutely idiotic programming decision by the Blender team. I totally love the work they're doing, but this is pure stupidity.

"Just so we're clear what the issue is: In games, you typically animate actions. Then in Unity, Unreal, or whatever, you can reference those actions from the code. eg if player is holding down the w key, play the walk action, if they hit lmb, play the attack action, and so on.

So what happens is someone can easily spend an entire day animating those actions, completely unaware that they aren't being saved in the blend because they haven't flagged a fake user. Even if they're exporting and testing, everything seems to work. It's just when they finally close and reopen the blend file do they realize all their work gone, and often have no idea why. Which is frustrating, and if it's a game being made with a budget, it's expensive."


I really don't understand why this is a thing. BY DEFAULT if you create a new action, Blender will delete everything you did AUTOMATICALLY and WITHOUT TELLING YOU! How in the world is this a good idea? What possible benefit could there be to automatically deleting all the work you did?

[still__alive]

Originally posted by Jon.Topps:

I really don't understand why this is a thing. BY DEFAULT if you create a new action, Blender will delete everything you did AUTOMATICALLY and WITHOUT TELLING YOU! How in the world is this a good idea? What possible benefit could there be to automatically deleting all the work you did?

Blender always had a bias towards the creation of movies, as I understand the history of the software. So it hasn't necessarily been designed towards the creation of video games and it's always been lacking (relative to the industry standard software) tools or whatever for the creation of video games. I can't explain it better than that atm, I'm tired.

For a more "concrete" answer, that "fake user" system was designed with the intention on cutting down file bloat, as I understand it. Say you create 100 textures, but you only end up using 2 or 3 of them. The rest of them are sittng there unused, so as the user you have the option of marking those other unused textures (fake user) as important, and anything you don't mark will get tossed out. To keep your overall file clean, keep the file size down.

[still__alive]

Also the Blender team had, maybe still has, a lot of design ideas that went against the norm. The theory behind some of them may or may not make sense, but it definitely throws people coming from other professional software for a loop.

The 3d cursor, right-click select, no double clicking to open folders in the file browser, to name a few. I remember reading that the idea behind the single clicks in file browser was to make it more ergonomical or whatever and reduce repetitive actions. Right-click select might've had a similar idea behind it, come to think of it. Something about spreading the work out more across all your fingers or something.

The "fake user" design is also a safeguard against accidentally deleting something, if I'm remembering some things correctly. Nothing is ever truly gone (I think, now I'm wondering if you can remove animations) from your file as long as you're using it somewhere, you cannot accidentally delete a texture from the file. However, if you are not using that texture, and didn't mark it as important, then it doesn't get saved in the file after you save and close, thereby reducing the file size a little bit.

Which is the only reason I ever learned about the "fake user" system, lol. I was trying to permanently remove a texture or something and couldn't figure out how to get it out of the file.

[Jon.Topps]

Thanks for the help understanding. I can definitely understand wanting to manage file sizes, but that seems pretty extreme. Like today, I made a few new actions, and animated them. I saved, and closed. I open the program back up, and they're gone. There wasn't even a notification when closing saying "you will lose 4 hours of work", lol. Yeah, I'm not "using" them anywhere, but I still did a lot of work making them. Maybe if I were making a movie I was making the actions to use later, it would still delete them automatically without being asked and without notification.