Hi, I had created multiple hair particles systems in blender, and was happily working on them when suddenly Blender (4.2.1 LTS Steam) stopped allowing me to edit the hair. When I switch to particle edit view, I see no guide overlays, and my comb doesn’t appear either. It just keep showing the message “Point cache must be baked in memory to enable editing!” Deleting the edit did nothing. Creating new particle systems seems to be working***, but none of the existing particle systems are allowing edits, except for parting and clumping and other built-in modifications. I really can’t afford to lose days of hard work…
This is the only other reference I found to anything remotely similar to this issue.
I tried enabling hair dynamics for the particle systems, which showed a new ‘cache’ tab. The ‘bake’ command did bake something, but it did absolutely nothing to fix the issue. Bake all dynamics did nothing as well. The warning about point cache remained.
I’ve spent a lot of time getting to this point, and if I have to start over (Which might still leave me vulnerable to the same problem down the line) it’d be quite painful.
I can’t state how grateful I’d be if someone could help me out.
*** Correction: Even new particle systems cannot be edited in particle edit mode!
I also noticed that it was set to cloth, but changing that didn’t fix it. Please see my reply for more info.
I do not consider this an applicable solution, as the following happened purely by accident, and still cost me the time I spent grooming three different hair particle systems. I still believe something got bugged somewhere during this process.
So I seem to have managed to get the editability back, at the cost of a few hours worth of work, and I will post it here so maybe someone smarter than me can make something of it.
So first I noticed that the particles had somehow switched to ‘cloth’, so I changed it back to particles. Suddenly I saw the hair guide overlays, panicked, and hit undo. it went back to cloth. But when I hit ‘redo’, it went to ‘particle’ again, but the guides remained gone.
I deleted the particle edit, pressed undo, did it again, and then deleted the bake I had previously done in vain, deleted the particle edit again and then suddenly the guide lines and brush tool came back again. I had to repeat this ritual for the other particle system as well, and my third particle system just started working as soon as I clicked on it, with seemingly nothing to do with the actions I took. I guess whichever gremlin that was prancing around the blender code decided to take pity on me.
P.s. - As feared, one of my particle systems disappeared yet again upon ticking “Use modifire stack” on and off. Render and viewport results vastly differ. I had to delete the edit yet again to get the hair guides and comb back. I’m using around 70 guides*400 interpolated children. (same amount in render, in eevee, set to strip) per particle instance.
It’s 4AM and I’ve been working sleepless, only for Blender to undo all of it again. I’m just gonna stop and leave this here till someone sees this
