This bug makes Blender completely useless for any animation!

Support Animation and Rigging
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I am not part of the bughunting squad, so this goes here. Feel free to relate it to the proper authorities, but this NEEDS public attention, so I consider it an integral part of the Blender discussion, as it is, without hyperbole, a game breaker for the software’s future.
Note: I use 2.79. If this has been THOROUGHLY AND DIRECTLY ADRESSED AND RESOLVED in 2.8+, please let me know. “I haven’t seen it” does not mean it has been adressed; it NEEDS to be directly resolved, without ifs or buts.

I am working on a movie project. A bug that I have seen before has just turned up again, possibly ruining several days of work for me. This bug is so profound that if it is not extremely unique and easily resolved, it makes Blender useless for any kind of serious animation. I am not trying to blow anything out of proportion; something with this bug is literally useless in any professional setting.

The bug is simple: If I load a scene, I risk parts of the animation to be randomly “forgotten”. In this case, a head is not turning as it was animated to. When I scrub through the timeline, Blender might “remember” the animation, but then it forgets the animation for an IK bone. It is NOT a screen update issue; if I render, THE ANIMATION IS MISSING!! Blender is flat out dropping animation, for no warranted reason. I suspect a memory issue, but no matter the reason, this makes Blender completely useless, as animation gets dropped randomly during work, through no user error. It would literally be better if the whole program crashed, or froze. If I make the mistake of correcting the animation, thinking I was the one who forgot something, the entire animation gets messed up, because Blender forgets and remembers mixed pieces of animation.

This is the only bug I have ever encountered in a serious piece of software that is completely unacceptable and destroys all usability of the software. Blender can never be considered “professional” anmation software if a bug like this exists, and to be perfectly honest, all developent should grind to a complete halt until a game breaking bug like this is permanently eradicated. I may have to reconsider ever using Blender again if this bug continues, and that truly crushes my heart. I want Blender, but Blender CANNOT be used for animation if it cannot be depended uon to remember work done, always and coherently.

If this is not fixed, Blender literally has no future. No, this is not hyperbole. You cannot use software that throws out your work at random. There is no way around that.

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Blender was used to produce several open movies, several movies and games.
This is not an hyperbole at all to say that thousands of people succeeded to make professional work using Blender.
Your problem is certainly not global. If it was the case, the issue would have been address, years ago.

So, if you are not able to share any useful information, there is no way somebody can help you to narrow research in order to help you to solve your problem.

Your description is really vague.
As it is described, a possible explanation could be that Auto Run Python Scripts option is disabled, ruining part of animation related to drivers.
But there should be an obvious warning and an obvious button asking if you want to enable them.

Another explanation could be to mix work done in different series of Blender.
You should be able to open work done in 2.79 in 2.8 or 2.9 without problem.
But because depsgraph is different, you can encounter problems if you try to open 2.8 or 2.9 files with 2.79.
I would not be surprised by a lost of constraints by such attempt between releases for the ones compatibility is not assured.

8 Likes
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“Not everyone encounters the problem” is not a resolution. Not everyone’s phone batteries exploded back when that was an issue, but it warranted a total recall of all the phones. This is a similar, though not -physically- dangerous, bug.

The bug is as described. Animation files drop keyframes or entire animation channels without warning or reason, sometimes “remembering” the data when the timeline is scrubbed. It might have to do with a clash between NLA and regular keyframing, but that is besides the issue. The issue being that anyone might become unable to use Blender for animation without warning. I am not saying that “nobody can make animations”, I am saying that the software becomes useless for serious animation (open movies are, sadly, not considered industry style serious) when Blender discards data without cause or structure. You cannot run a serious project with software that can at any moment throw your work out the window without any recourse. You wouldn’t drive a car across crountry if you knew the engine might fall apart without notice, either, would you? No, not even if a hundred people had managed to do it. Who knows how many failed (survival bias, basically). Blender will never be more than a toy for hobbyist unless stability in use becomes impeccable, and as stated, this is a deal breaker (I wrote game breaker last, my mistake).

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Did you report your issue, including failing file as sample for dev to repro ? At some point it is the only way to get things fixed.

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Hi Embassy

I am still needing to use 2.79 for several professional animation projects on the go now and overall have found it’s last iteration 2,79 b to be pretty solid for me so far. I am also often needing to swap complex scenes and assets between PC and Mac systems both running 2.79 and never had an issue. But I just might not have encountered this bug yet in what I am doing.

How complex and heavy are the scenes overall ? Does it involve multiple characters ?

‘ When I scrub through the timeline, Blender might “remember” the animation, but then it forgets the animation for an IK bone. ‘

So are the controller bones of the rig still getting animated but the IK or deformer joints not updating ?
If so then this obviously sounds at its core like a rigging issue. Are the underlying bones getting keyed by accident as well ? I’ve seen this often happen in Maya workflows. I’ve often accidentally done it myself.

Are you referencing the rigs and other assets into the core animation scenes ? How are the rigs constructed ? Are they automated rigs or custom built ? How big is this movie project. Is it a team production with assets and files being shared around a lot between people ?

In your last post you mention NLA as well. Is this an issue only specific to that ?

Another thing to consider is are these animation keys being lost on the first re opening of a scene or does it happen gradually like a gradual degrading of the scene or is it sudden and unexpected ? Also I would check if any links or dependency’s within the scene might be getting lost or corrupted. So possibly if it is a referenced in rig linked to an object or other rig in the scene that might cause some animation and IK issues upon reopening if not properly set up.

Animation and data loss can occur in all the major 3D apps and Blender is no different. But often the causes can be workflow based and broadly common and cross platform in nature. If this is a bug I’m not sure if it could be fixed now as development has moved into the 2.8 phase. But also 2.79 is mostly very stable so hopefully there is a reasonably simple workflow - workaround around if this does still come up often.

All the best.

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As stated, I’m not a bug hunter and this is not just about the bug. It is about a deepseated flaw that makes Blender a liability in animation work. And the issue does not seem to be tied directly to a file, but to Blender during operation.
I don’t want to just report a bug. I want to draw attention to a valid reason for studios to not consider Blender viable software for large scale animation projects Because I would like Blender to BE viable for large scale animation projects.
I understand the desire to consider this just another routine bug, but this is a bigger issue with Blender, just as the problems with the GUI was in eons past.

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There is no swapping between machines. The issue seems to be triggered in certain unclear situations, as I have not encountered it for a few years. Last time, it ruined a major animation project, though, so I am VERY aware of it when I see it!

I am rendering it now, with some (clumsy) fixes. It has two basic armature rigs and simple objects, all for scaled down testing purposes (it’s ugly but functional, basically). It uses audio in the editor, and problems seem(!!) to have started with the second rig using NLA action strips, though that might be coincidence.

It’s completely random. Except it seems to be related to some of the last changes made, so it might be a data overload thing.

Keys disappear and reappear at random, so it’s probably not accidental keying. I did notice that it tends to temporarily erase entire blocks of bone keyframe data, almost as if it’s not loading from memory but the program keeps running as if nothing i missing, if that makes any sense.

Single file, no sharing, custom simple rigs. Not sure what you mean with referencing into the core?

No, just a suspicion, since it started happening after some NLA work. I thought some wires might have gotten crossed, but that woudn’t explain data reappearing and disappearing over and over.

Neither. They disappear and reappear completely at (seemingly) random, as if it’s an update issue that is just extremely persistent.

No linking or proxies. Dependencies would have shown up earlier, and would not cause keyframe data to disappear and reappear at random like this (I believe).

Last I saw it was an earlier version, I think 2.4x. It seems to be (speculation here) a problem with memory management, perhaps tied to file storage. No idea for sure, though. The only work around seems to be a complete do over of the animation which is NOT an acceptable solution on a serious project. My project is luckily not so serious this time, but it prevents me from chainging that, of course…

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So, you want everybody accept that statement although you are not competent to make such statement.

If you refuse to do minimal work to investigate why you are the only guy complaining ; don’t expect people to take your remarks seriously.

There are several hundreds of bugs and as many known issues and todos listed which can be described as more than a thousand of lacks and flaws in Blender software. They are publicly mentioned in development site.

2.8 and 2.9 series are particular series where many flaws are accepted because they are work in progress during the transition from old 2.7 design to new design.
2.79b was supposed to be a solid release before transition. Its problems were not more embarrassing than other 3d animation software.
Whatever software is used, people are making incremental saves to minimize impact of such problems.
Are all your previous .blend files also corrupted ?

If you are sure to have find a major flaw that is not already listed and want to warn people about it, just follow expected procedure and do a bugreport.

3 Likes
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If you do not report the problem or you do not share the problematic .blend file so that others can analyze if it is a bug or is it that you are doing something wrong, this thread seems rather started to generate controversy with a problem that at the moment only you have. I’m not sure if this thread should stay open for long as long as you don’t share a clear example where the problem occurs so that it can be analyzed.

2 Likes
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Agreed with @YAFU; provide clear steps to reproduce and/or a .blend file that illustrates the problem and report this on the Blender Bugtracker. To be frank, I doubt they’ll fix 2.79 issues as this ship has long sailed and I recommend you switch to the recent versions.

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To me, that’s one of the core issues here.

Everyone works differently. People use different tools or extensions to accomplish similar goals. It is literally impossible to understand what the cause of the issue could be.

It appears like a bigger issue, because you don’t understand what is going on. Every single bug is like that at first. That’s why it is necessary to figure out what is going on. This takes away the mystery and makes it into a regular bug.

Edit: One productive way to approach this would be to ask for help in reproducing the bug. You would need to share some files or explain your workflow. With that, you could get a better understanding of the issue and turn it into a bug report, or maybe you would discover a flaw in your workflow.

1 Like
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I’ll try to mak this as clear as I can without sounding like it’s being dumbed down: There is no clear way to reproduce the error, or I would have described it. Blender has done it beefore, in earlier versions. Keyframe data just disappears and reappears at random. I am raising the issue here because this is not a regular bug report (I am not a bughunter, but as stated, anyone who is is free to report it, if they can reproduce it). I want to draw attention to some serious issues with Blender, that make it unfit for professional animation. While this of course rubs some people the wrong way (I get touchy about my favorite animation software, too), this is an issue that has to be taken serious. If you disagree, this might not be the thread for you, sorry. All I want to do is talk to people about this problem, what can be done (STOP just saying “report it”, please, this is not just some minor bug), maybe how to minimize it until there is a more permanent solution.

In short, please stop just saying “report it or go away”. This goes beyond a mere bug. I am about to write a discussion topic on that now. People are welcome to join it, when it is done.

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Indeed. Report it on the official bugtracker. Writing about it here definitely won’t get it solved.

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I am writing here to discuss it. I want to discuss it with people. If I can figure out eenough about it, I will report it. This is a discussion board for discussion about Blender issues. I am discussing an issue about Bleeender, not just reporting a bug.

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You are discussing a technical issue while sharing pretty much no information about it. It is not possible to have a discussion on that basis, definitely no constructive one where progress can be made as far as I can see.

Edit: We don’t know whether you are linking character and you are animating them. We don’t even know if you are animating objects, armatures, … .

3 Likes
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Did you perhaps forget to assign a fake user an animation action and when reloading the scene it was deleted?

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From the described behavior may be a file corruption / hardware error.
But we also can’t exclude a problem between sit and keyboard.
By the way the thread title is a bit harsh for a constructive discussion to occurs.

1 Like
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Hi Embassy

I mentioned the swapping between PC and Mac as an example of how robust 2.79 b generally seems to to be.

As for referencing into the core scene. I was meaning an animation scene where most of or all of the assets and rigs are referenced in. So that the animation data is being saved in this core animation scene and the non animated assets and rigs stored else where. Or if the rigs and assets are being referenced with animation data already attached to them from their source files ?
But it sounds like you are not using any referencing and everything is in the core or base animation scene ?

Could this in essence be an issue to do with Blenders Action Editor and it’s system of saving animation data and files ? Often data or parts of can be lost this way. I have often myself and it can be frustrating. It’s possible to have multiple animation files for the same rig in one scene in the Action Editor and jump around between them. So it’s possible to save multiple working versions of a file. Walk .001 and Walk 002 … etc.
Sometimes this data can be lost on saving if it has no clear user. There is the option in the Action Editor to save animation even if it has no user, The Fake User saving option. It’s always a good idea to check that just in case.

Also obviously save backups of all valuable animation data. Re open the file and check them after saving. Then keep that back up and work over a new one.

As regards the NLA. I have never been personally keen on non liner animation editors in any apps.
Blender XSI or Maya. Especially for film TV narrative driven scene type animation. Most professional animators I know feel much the same. They hide too much from the animator for me and problem issues can be hard to track down. I like to stick to key frames and curves where possible.
Because in Blender it is possible to have multiple animation files for a single rig. You are also able to copy and paste key frames between them and this is a great way to build a longer animation out of different saved actions. So I would suggest trying that as well.

Blender 2.79b is generally regarded as being pretty stable. So I am sure this can be solved with a clear identification of the issues and a revised workflow of some kind.

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If nobody can reproduce it, there’s nothing to discuss. Nevermind that this is a user forum, and users don’t generally fix bugs anyway. Whether it’s a plain old bug or a “deep seated issue” can’t be determined without finding the cause first, but in all probability, it sounds like a plain old bug, just an old one. Also possible you’re just doing it wrong. But we’ll never know, since you won’t report, and we can’t reproduce.

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I shared what I had. Your questions were answeered above, I believe (no linking, two armatures)