The current animation project on which I’m working demands that I develop a bunch of different animation cycles for a particular asset. I was asked to experiment with Blender’s action editor to see if the actions could be added in here and if they would export as separate animations in a Collada file.
I’m finding the action editor pretty intuitive so far, but one thing is confusing me. When I switch between the currently viewed action, it increments the number of the data. In the course of playing around with this feature, I have rolled that number up into the 50s. I’m beginning to worry that I’m creating a whole bunch of redundant data somewhere. Why does that number increment each time I view the aciton?
I don’t know how the actions are created. But indeed it does not seem to be possible to delete an action in the UI. But here is how you can do it by script:
# say you want to delete the action with the index 2:
bpy.data.actions[2].user_clear()
bpy.data.actions.remove( bpy.data.actions[2])
Select action in action editor. “Unpress” “F” button to the right from it. Click “x” button to delete. Save file. Reload file. Action will be gone. “F” button (pressed by default) gives a fake user to the action and prevents blender from deleting action even if no one is using it.
In 2.5 if you hover your mouse over the ‘x’ to the right of the action name, you get a tool tip about ‘shift + click to force removal on save’ and as far as I see, it works. Save the file, close blender and reload the file, the action is gone…AFAIK, I’m not the used to 2.5 but it’s data management seems much better than 2.49
I shouldn’t need to delete any actions. I already know all the actions I need. I want to know what this number means:
If I were to switch out to view the Fly action, then go back to this Walk action, that number would become 5. If I switch again, it becomes six. I have some actions in my file that are up in the 50s now. If there are 50 users of this data, this means there must be 50 of something I’ve created, but I don’t know what it is. What’s using these actions? And why is a new one created every time I view it in the action editor
Hopefully this isn’t a sinfully old thread… Just wanted to reply and say I think that this is a bug,one that I find strange to be present after months of Durian animation work. I believe that number is the number of linked copies of that animation that exist. Every time I switch animations on my armature it makes a new linked copy of that animation. Not what you want.
I feel like actions should be viewable and deletable in the outliner or in some sort of list. I don’t see a reason why they can’t be deleted easily or in multiples.
