Animations Lost due to Fake User Disabled by default (v2.6.2)

Support Basics & Interface
1

I know I am not the first one to experience this, and I am shocked a change like this was kept in a release version. I just lost the last 20-25 minutes of work on my animation because I wasn’t aware you had to hit the ‘F’ (fake user) button beside the animation so it wouldn’t be deleted when you closed the blend file.

I was told on IRC, “Everybody is learning that the hard way.” So clearly plenty of other users have lost work because of this change. Instead of the user explicitly deleting an action, they’re all discarded unless you manually tell it not to.

While this makes sense for materials (generally, an object only uses a single material) the same cannot be stated for animations, where a single character may have over 100 animations when being exported for a game (which is precisely what I’m working on).

Now (if I keep using 2.6.2) I’ll have to remember for every animation I make to check the Fake User button otherwise I’ll lose even more work. Which considering the amount of animations I’ll be making, I’ll probably do more than once.

I cannot afford wasting time with a program which helpfully deletes my animations unless I specifically tell it not to. Until this nonsensical change is reverted I am going back to blender 2.5. :frowning:

2

Lighten up. It’s a slight workflow change. Just click the button. No biggie.

3

Don’t agree - it is bad GUI design to force a user to click an obscure button to prevent data loss - removal of data should be a conscious decision on the user part, not keeping the data in the first place. I am actually quite amazed this was changed, and it is completely ridiculous behaviour for animators.

4

I have to disagree, freen. While the change itself seems small (a default is inverted), its ramifications are huge, as they affect many users’ approach to workflow if they are doing multi-Action animations. It’s particularly distressing that the change was apparently not recognized as being as major as it obviously is, so it was not very well-communicated given its importance, and many people lost data because of it. This alone indicates that it is much more than a “slight workflow change.” Those affected shouldn’t be treated condescendingly, either.