Maybe i understood it wrong, but ehm time scaling of motion (stretching) is done using the Dope-Sheet,
time moving also, same shortcuts for copy / scale / move as in other places of blender (to move your P -frame lines on the time line).
Well today I have once again stumbled on what looks like blenderâs biggest BULLSHIT DESIGN flaw in therms of animations.
It is actually a design flaw (if you see it as a must have feature, you must be delusional), not a technical flaw.
Some of you might know that at this moment the international Game Jam competition is running.
I used blender to make the main player sprite - running in 4 directions.
Now to make animations I usually copied previous animations - I made 9 actions for the player. I worked on them an entire day. And kept saving the file. But I forgot that little thing that ONLY BLENDER has. That little detail of hitting the âfâ button next to the newly created actions.
So after 12 hours of work, I saved the file and closed it. Reopened it- bam! All my animations gone!
They were good god damn it.
Then I remembered that blender deletes newly created or copied actions if you dont tick the f-key ever time. Can we please have this F button ticked by default when you make a new action or copy an existing one?
No other software in existance makes you do this obscure bulshit. Im pressured by a deadline- its normal to forget that blender has that bullshit design point of making it a user.
Can you PLEASE make blender f%$#ing remember all actions, without the need of the " dont F-uck me up" confirmation button next to the actions.
How many more other animation actions must be lost that way?
Make it optional god damn it. I want to switch it off, or never again use blender for a gamejam competition! I want to strangle the developer who came up with this original approach to saving actions in your file.
Saving a file should save what you have created in it and have opened on your screen when you close blender by default. Fullstop. Get real and make blender more predictable
Another feature that would be seriously handy is onion-skinning for complete characters with the option of showing red/blue for ahead/behind the current frame. Something similar to bhGhost by Brian Horgan.
Now that the grease pencil has been overhauled, perhaps onionskinning could grow out of that.
Actually scaling from cursor while playing is even more problematic in dopesheet. Its a bad sideeffect of using playhead as a scale origin. That was the problem I was referring to. I used feature of scaling keyframe segments (speed up/slow down) in almost all software I used while playing to fine tune animation.
Yes, this is really silly. User-generated data should always go considered sacred, and not be auto-deleted under any circumstances. It seems pretty obvious, but unfortunately this is one of those odd things that Ton really likes, and that he supposedly doesnât want to change (last time we spoke).
The whole idea behind âdatablocks that are deleted if not used unless you press an obscure F-buttonâ is confusing, error-prone and potentially leads to data loss.
Itâs a hard battle to fight, but I do hope the can be made sane.
at least make it optional? I though he was also all about giving the user a choice
Well, time to back his words. Blender is open source right? How come someone doesnt write an add-on that cures this madness??
It has in fact led to data loss. Not one, but many times for me. I have to remind myself over and over, and still cant learn this- since to me its still unexpected for the software to do such a purge.
If anything is going to be deleted, it should be done by my choice, with a confirmation. And be obvious, clear and undoable. This is absolutely going against any standards. Itâs like a bad prank on the user.
Itâs like giving a baby a loaded gun when you leave things like this in the design. People will hurt themselves, then blame the software for being crap (the GUI/design still being the culprit here) and go back to maya or whatever autodesk product.
I am sorry but this seems like another case of a programmer enforcing a silly rule to artists using his creation- just so in his head the code is consistent.
Preventing data loss is much more important than proving a point about your unique design decisions. If many people are complaining, repetitively- change things. Let people change what they hate.
Or people will stop using the software. Come on, this is probably a few lines of code. Stuff like this - especially data loss- gives blender the kind of bad name that in needs to leave in the past.
If you want to make things transparent- why not do it like any other software- let the user delete data blocks he doesnt want. Make it easier to do so- clear and fast.
Delete only when prompted by the user. Keep everything that is opened in front of the userâs eyes when ctrl+S is issued.
What is the outliner for then- isnt that supposed to be for managing things in the scene??
Why the hell are you doing this from a selection list and a tick button? Its not even a tick box- its a frigging button with an âFâ on it. Why are you making a decision to delete something if a user doesnt do an obscure action that only your software demands. Insane and not welcoming to newcomers at all.
When you click the âadd new actionâ button, 99% of the time you would expect blender to keep the action you just added. Who the hell adds an action and doesnt expect the software to keep it. You are making the assumption that a new datablock is more than likely going to be purged when closing the scene. So by default blender is purging everything you add - unless you tell it not to. Come on, saving the scene should be enough to keep it. Why do you have to add an extra layer of abstraction to the process.
I thought about bringing up the fake-user problem the other day, but I didnât want to be the guy that did. But yeah, itâs easily the worst aspect of animation in Blender.
If actions being saved by default are inconvenient for movie production, a better way to manage/delete them should have been created. I think the way it is currently is completely irresponsible. Nobody wants to pay an artist for 8 hours of animation work and have nothing to show for it because they forgot or didnât know to click the F icon.
The datablock/fake user thing really needs to go anyway. It makes saving/managing data in Blender unnecessarily complicated and error prone in several areas.
True on every level. Remove the fake user crap entirely, then provide some tools to manually clean out unused datablocks. Along with the manual cleaning tools add a convenient alternate save option to the file menu: âSave and Cleanâ
I have lost my fair share of things by forgetting to hit F as well.
Agreed about the âFâ thing. Itâs error prone. Itâs also uncomfortable trusting a program to delete its own data anyway. Especially as it sometimes takes two or three save/shut down/restart to get rid of a stubborn material that doesnât want to die. The feature makes no ergonomic sense at all. It would be better to have a user initiated âdelete unused datablocksâ command, that brings up a list of what itâs going to delete for confirmation first.
Talking of which, it also seriously needs a manual cache clearing command. Having to rekey some arbitrary value to ânudgeâ the cache is Not Good.
The whole âmust press âfâ to save the actionâ thing is another major bugbear of mine as well. Canât tell you how many hours Iâve lost to this thing when whipping together something under time pressure (you know, when stupid things like that will slip your mind). Itâs backward, unintuitive, and even as a developer who likes my functionality uniform - I donât think there is any reasonable excuse for this.
Like xrg, though, I was not going to mention it because I knew it was a deliberate decision of Tonâs and Iâve already labelled as âthat guyâ for criticising him in regards to his coloured wireframes decision.
Just adding a voice in agreement regarding fake users.
I once filed a bug report because the behavior was contrary to the documentation, which at the time said new actions have default fake users.
Sadly, the documentation was changed, not the behavior. =/
Maybe there can be a notification that pops up when exiting Blender?
Saying something like, âThe following actions will be deleted upon exit. Continue?â and show a list of user-less actions with âFâ next to them that you can toggle.
I wish there was some kind of functionality like this in Blender.
In Daz3D you can save snapshots of poses with one click on some kind of map and later select them or even MIX the poses quickly (which is even recordable). Absolutely awesome for animating purposes.
I could have sworn Ton was involved in the mailing list conversation on it, but going back to reread it I see he was silent on the matter despite Cessen, Bassam, and other BF personages stating that they preferred the automatic fake user (for much the same reasons we do).
My apologies to Ton, should he be reading (or have read) this.
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Of interest from the mailing list discussion was the tidbit of Nicholas Bishopâs stating that they add a fake user to new brushes. Clearly the inconsistency issue is not as big a deal for some developers as others.
The Pose Library, once you find it, is pretty nice. If you (like me) found the documentation a little sparse for locating the panel in question, it is under the Armature section of the Properties panel. If, like me, your screen wishes it was as large as your plasma screen, youâll need to scroll down to see it
To select armature section, press the highlighted button:
Scroll down for the Pose Library panel (you may need to expand it by clicking arrow on left):
Thank you for the links.
